Download or read book History and the Supernatural in Medieval England written by C. S. Watkins and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-11-25 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a fascinating study of religious culture in England from 1050 to 1250. Drawing on the wealth of material about religious belief and practice that survives in the chronicles, Carl Watkins explores the accounts of signs, prophecies, astrology, magic, beliefs about death, and the miraculous and demonic. He challenges some of the prevailing assumptions about religious belief, questioning in particular the attachment of many historians to terms such as 'clerical' and 'lay', 'popular' and 'elite', 'Christian' and 'pagan' as explanatory categories. The evidence of the chronicles is also set in its broader context through explorations of miracle collections, penitential manuals, exempla and sermons. The book traces shifts in the way the supernatural was conceptualized by learned writers and the ways in which broader patterns of belief evolved during this period. This original account sheds important light on belief during a period in which the religious landscape was transformed.

Download or read book History and the Supernatural in Medieval England written by Carl S. Watkins and published by . This book was released on 2014-05-14 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Natural and the Supernatural in the Middle Ages written by Robert Bartlett and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2008-03-17 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploration of how medieval people categorized the world, concentrating on the division between the natural and the supernatural.

Download or read book The Routledge History of Medieval Magic written by Sophie Page and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-01-15 with total page 769 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge History of Medieval Magic brings together the work of scholars from across Europe and North America to provide extensive insights into recent developments in the study of medieval magic between c.1100 and c.1500. This book covers a wide range of topics, including the magical texts which circulated in medieval Europe, the attitudes of intellectuals and churchmen to magic, the ways in which magic intersected with other aspects of medieval culture, and the early witch trials of the fifteenth century. In doing so, it offers the reader a detailed look at the impact that magic had within medieval society, such as its relationship to gender roles, natural philosophy, and courtly culture. This is furthered by the book’s interdisciplinary approach, containing chapters dedicated to archaeology, literature, music, and visual culture, as well as texts and manuscripts. The Routledge History of Medieval Magic also outlines how research on this subject could develop in the future, highlighting under-explored subjects, unpublished sources, and new approaches to the topic. It is the ideal book for both established scholars and students of medieval magic.

Download or read book Ghosts A Social History vol 1 written by Owen Davies and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-08-01 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reveals changing perceptions of ghosts at different social levels from the Reformation through to the twentieth century in Britain and America. This five-volume set focuses on the key published debates that emerged in each century, and illustrates the range of literary formats that reported or discussed ghosts.

Download or read book Wonder and Skepticism in the Middle Ages written by Keagan Brewer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-01-29 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wonder and Skepticism in the Middle Ages explores the response by medieval society to tales of marvels and the supernatural, which ranged from firm belief to outright rejection, and asks why the believers believed, and why the skeptical disbelieved. Despite living in a world whose structures more often than not supported belief, there were still a great many who disbelieved, most notably scholastic philosophers who began a polemical programme against belief in marvels. Keagan Brewer reevaluates the Middle Ages’ reputation as an era of credulity by considering the evidence for incidences of marvels, miracles and the supernatural and demonstrating the reasons people did and did not believe in such things. Using an array of contemporary sources, he shows that medieval responders sought evidence in the commonality of a report, similarity of one event to another, theological explanations and from people with status to show that those who believed in marvels and miracles did so only because the wonders had passed evidentiary testing. In particular, he examines both emotional and rational reactions to wondrous phenomena, and why some were readily accepted and others rejected. This book is an important contribution to the history of emotions and belief in the Middle Ages.

Download or read book The Linguistic Past in Twelfth Century Britain written by Sara Harris and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-12 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How was the complex history of Britain's languages understood by twelfth-century authors? This book argues that the social, political and linguistic upheavals that occurred in the wake of the Norman Conquest intensified later interest in the historicity of languages. An atmosphere of enquiry fostered vernacular literature's prestige and led to a newfound sense of how ancient languages could be used to convey historical claims. The vernacular hence became an important site for the construction and memorialisation of dynastic, institutional and ethnic identities. This study demonstrates the breadth of interest in the linguistic past across different social groups and the striking variety of genre used to depict it, including romance, legal translation, history, poetry and hagiography. Through a series of detailed case studies, Sara Harris shows how specific works represent key aspects of the period's imaginative engagement with English, Brittonic, Latin and French language development.

Download or read book Flodoard of Rheims and the Writing of History in the Tenth Century written by Edward Roberts and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-09-05 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A major re-assessment of the Frankish historian Flodoard of Rheims, one of the tenth century's most intriguing but neglected narrators.

Download or read book Death in Medieval Europe written by Joelle Rollo-Koster and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-10-04 with total page 509 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Death in Medieval Europe: Death Scripted and Death Choreographed explores new cultural research into death and funeral practices in medieval Europe and demonstrates the important relationship between death and the world of the living in the Middle Ages. Across ten chapters, the articles in this volume survey the cultural effects of death. This volume explores overarching topics such as burials, commemorations, revenants, mourning practices and funerals, capital punishment, suspiscious death, and death registrations using case studies from across Europe including England, Iceland, and Spain. Together these chapters discuss how death was ritualised and choreographed, but also how it was expressed in writing throughout various documentary sources including wills and death registries. In each instance, records are analysed through a cultural framework to better understand the importance of the authors of death and their audience. Drawing together and building upon the latest scholarship, this book is essential reading for all students and academics of death in the medieval period.

Download or read book Medieval Ghost Stories written by Andrew Joynes and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2006 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Medieval Ghost Stories" is a collection of ghostly occurrences from the eighth to the fourteenth centuries; they have been found in monastic chronicles and preaching manuals, in sagas and heroic poetry, and in medieval romances. In a religious age, the tales bore a peculiar freight of spooks and spirituality which can still make hair stand on end; unfailingly, these stories give a fascinating and moving glimpse into the medieval mind. Look only at the accounts of Richard Rowntree's stillborn child, glimpsed by his father tangled in swaddling clothes on the road to Santiago, or the sly habits of water sprites resting as goblets and golden rings on the surface of the river, just out of reach...

Download or read book Magic and the Supernatural in Medieval English Romance written by Corinne J. Saunders and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2010 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This study looks at a wide range of medieval Englisih romance texts, including the works of Chaucer and Malory, from a broad cultural perspective, to show that while they employ magic in order to create exotic, escapist worlds, they are also grounded in a sense of possibility, and reflect a complex web of inherited and current ideas." --Book Jacket.

Download or read book The Oxford English Literary History written by Laura Ashe and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-09-15 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford English Literary History is the new century's definitive account of a rich and diverse literary heritage that stretches back for a millennium and more. Each of these thirteen groundbreaking volumes offers a leading scholar's considered assessment of the authors, works, cultural traditions, events, and ideas that shaped the literary voices of their age. The series will enlighten and inspire not only everyone studying, teaching, and researching in English Literature, but all serious readers. This book describes and seeks to explain the vast cultural, literary, social, and political transformations which characterized the period 1000-1350. Change can be perceived everywhere at this time. Theology saw the focus shift from God the Father to the suffering Christ, while religious experience became ever more highly charged with emotional affectivity and physical devotion. A new philosophy of interiority turned attention inward, to the exploration of self, and the practice of confession expressed that interior reality with unprecedented importance. The old understanding of penitence as a whole and unrepeatable event, a second baptism, was replaced by a new allowance for repeated repentance and penance, and the possibility of continued purgation of sins after death. The concept of love moved centre stage: in Christ's love as a new explanation for the Passion; in the love of God as the only means of governing the self; and in the appearance of narrative fiction, where heterosexual love was suddenly represented as the goal of secular life. In this mode of writing further emerged the figure of the individual, a unique protagonist bound in social and ethical relation with others; from this came a profound recalibration of moral agency, with reference not only to God but to society. More generally, the social and ethical status of secular lives was drastically elevated by the creation and celebration of courtly and chivalric ideals. In England the ideal of kingship was forged and reforged over these centuries, in intimate relation with native ideals of counsel and consent, bound by the law. In the aftermath of Magna Carta, and as parliament grew in reach and importance, a politics of the public sphere emerged, with a literature to match. These vast transformations have long been observed and documented in their separate fields. The Oxford English Literary History: Volume 1: 1000-1350: Conquest and Transformation offers an account of these changes by which they are all connected, and explicable in terms of one another.

Download or read book English Identity and Political Culture in the Fourteenth Century written by Andrea Ruddick and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-11-21 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of the nature of national sentiment in fourteenth-century England, in its political and constitutional context.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Holinshed s Chronicles written by Paulina Kewes and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2012-12-27 with total page 812 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland (1577, 1587), issued under the name of Raphael Holinshed, was the crowning achievement of Tudor historiography, and became the principal source for the historical writings of Spenser, Daniel and, above all, Shakespeare. While scholars have long been drawn to Holinshed for its qualities as a source, they typically dismissed it as a baggy collection of materials, lacking coherent form and analytical insight. This condescending verdict has only recently given way to an appreciation of the literary and historical qualities of these chronicles. The Handbook is a major interdisciplinary undertaking which gives the lie to Holinshed's detractors, and provides original interpretations of a book that has lacked sustained academic scrutiny. Bringing together leading specialists in a variety of fields - literature, history, religion, classics, bibliography, and the history of the book - the Handbook demonstrates that the Chronicles powerfully reflect the nature of Tudor thinking about the past, about politics and society, and about the literary and rhetorical means by which readers might be persuaded of the truth of narrative. The volume shows how distinctive it was for one book to chronicle the history of three nations of the British archipelago. The various sections of the Handbook analyse the making of the two editions of the Chronicles; the relationship of the work to medieval and early modern historiography; its formal properties, genres and audience; attitudes to politics, religion, and society; literary appropriations; and the parallel descriptions and histories of England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. The result is a seminal study that shows unequivocally the vitality and complexity of the chronicle form in the late sixteenth century.

Download or read book The Secular Clergy in England 1066 1216 written by Hugh M. Thomas and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 445 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The secular clergy - priests and other clerics outside of monastic orders - were among the most influential and powerful groups in European society during the central Middle Ages. The secular clergy got their title from the Latin word for world, saeculum, and secular clerics kept the Church running in the world beyond the cloister wall, with responsibility for the bulk of pastoral care and ecclesiastical administration. This gave them enormous religious influence, although they were considered too worldly by many contemporary moralists - trying, for instance, to oppose the elimination of clerical marriage and concubinage. Although their worldliness created many tensions, it also gave the secular clergy much worldly influence. Contemporaries treated elite secular clerics as equivalent to knights, and some were as wealthy as minor barons. Secular clerics had a huge role in the rise of royal bureaucracy, one of the key historical developments of the period. They were instrumental to the intellectual and cultural flowering of the twelfth century, the rise of the schools, the creation of the book trade, and the invention of universities. They performed music, produced literature in a variety of genres and languages, and patronized art and architecture. Indeed, this volume argues that they contributed more than any other group to the Twelfth-Century Renaissance. Yet the secular clergy as a group have received almost no attention from scholars, unlike monks, nuns, or secular nobles. In The Secular Clergy in England, 1066-1216, Hugh Thomas aims to correct this deficiency through a major study of the secular clergy below the level of bishop in England from 1066 to 1216.

Download or read book Inspiration and Authority in the Middle Ages written by Brian FitzGerald and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-06 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inspiration and Authority in the Middle Ages rethinks the role of prophecy in the Middle Ages by examining how professional theologians responded to new assertions of divine inspiration. Drawing on fresh archival research and detailed study of unpublished manuscript sources from the twelfth to fourteenth centuries, this volume argues that the task of defining prophetic authority became a crucial intellectual and cultural enterprise as university-trained theologians confronted prophetic claims from lay mystics, radical Franciscans, and other unprecedented visionaries. In the process, these theologians redescribed their own activities as prophetic by locating inspiration not in special predictions or ecstatic visions but in natural forms of understanding and in the daily work of ecclesiastical teaching and ministry. Instead of containing the spread of prophetic privilege, however, scholastic assessments of prophecy from Peter Lombard and Thomas Aquinas to Peter John Olivi and Nicholas Trevet opened space for claims of divine insight to proliferate beyond the control of theologians. By the turn of the fourteenth century, secular Italian humanists could lay claim to prophetic authority on the basis of their intellectual powers and literary practices. From Hugh of St Victor to Albertino Mussato, reflections on and debates over prophecy reveal medieval clerics, scholars, and reformers reshaping the contours of religious authority, the boundaries of sanctity and sacred texts, and the relationship of tradition to the new voices of the Late Middle Ages.

Download or read book What Is History For written by Arthur Alfaix Assis and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2014-01-01 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A scholar of Hellenistic and Prussian history, Droysen developed a historical theory that at the time was unprecedented in range and depth, and which remains to the present day a valuable key for understanding history as both an idea and a professional practice. Arthur Alfaix Assis interprets Droysen’s theoretical project as an attempt to redefine the function of historiography within the context of a rising criticism of exemplar theories of history, and focuses on Droysen’s claim that the goal underlying historical writing and reading should be the development of the subjective capacity to think historically. In addition, Assis examines the connections and disconnections between Droysen’s theory of historical thinking, his practice of historical thought, and his political activism. Ultimately, Assis not only shows how Droysen helped reinvent the relationship between historical knowledge and human agency, but also traces some of the contradictions and limitations inherent to that project.