Download or read book The Spiritual Franciscans written by David Burr and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2015-09-30 with total page 441 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2002 John Gilmary Shea Prize and the 2002 Howard R. Marraro Prize of the American Catholic Historical Association. When Saint Francis of Assisi died in 1226, he left behind an order already struggling to maintain its identity. As the Church called upon Franciscans to be bishops, professors, and inquisitors, their style of life began to change. Some in the order lamented this change and insisted on observing the strict poverty practiced by Francis himself. Others were more open to compromise. Over time, this division evolved into a genuine rift, as those who argued for strict poverty were marginalized within the order. In this book, David Burr offers the first comprehensive history of the so-called Spiritual Franciscans, a protest movement within the Franciscan order. Burr shows that the movement existed more or less as a loyal opposition in the late thirteenth century, but by 1318 Pope John XXII and leaders of the order had combined to force it beyond the boundaries of legitimacy. At that point the loyal opposition turned into a heretical movement and recalcitrant friars were sent to the stake. Although much has been written about individual Spiritual Franciscan leaders, there has been no general history of the movement since 1932. Few people are equipped to tackle the voluminous documentary record and digest the sheer mass of research generated by Franciscan scholars in the last century. Burr, one of the world's leading authorities on the Franciscans, has given us a book that will define the field for years to come.

Download or read book Demonic Possession and Lived Religion in Later Medieval Europe written by Sari Katajala-Peltomaa and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-19 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Demonic possession was a spiritual state that often had physical symptoms; however, in Demonic Possession and Lived Religion in Later Medieval Europe, Sari Katajala-Peltomaa argues that demonic possession was a social phenomenon which should be understood with regard to the community and culture. She focuses on significant case studies from canonization processes (c. 1240-1450) which show how each set of sources formed its own specific context, in which demonic presence derived from different motivations, reasonings, and methods of categorization. The chosen perspective is that of lived religion, which is both a thematic approach and a methodology: a focus on rituals, symbols, and gestures, as well as sensitivity to nuances and careful contextualizing of the cases are constitutive elements of the argumentation. The analysis contests the hierarchy between the 'learned' and the 'popular' within religion, as well as the existence of a strict polarity between individual and collective religious participation. Demonic presence disclosed negotiations over authority and agency; it shows how the personal affected the communal, and vice versa, and how they were eventually transformed into discourses and institutions of the Church; that is, definitions of the miraculous and the diabolical. Geographically, the volume covers Western Europe, comparing Northern and Southern material and customs. The structure follows the logic of the phenomenon, beginning with the background reasons offered as a cause of demonic possession, continuing with communities' responses and emotions, including construction of sacred caregiving methods. Finally, the ways in which demonic presence contributed to wider societal debates in the fields of politics and spirituality are discussed. Alterity and inversion of identity, gender, and various forms of corporeality and the interplay between the sacred and diabolical are themes that run all through the volume.

Download or read book The Gift of Tongues written by Christine F. Cooper-Rompato and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2010-01-25 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tales of xenoglossia—the instantaneous ability to read, to write, to speak, or to understand a foreign language—have long captivated audiences. Perhaps most popular in Christian religious literature, these stories celebrate the erasing of all linguistic differences and the creation of wider spiritual communities. The accounts of miraculous language acquisition that appeared in the Bible inspired similar accounts in the Middle Ages. Though medieval xenoglossic miracles have their origins in those biblical stories, the medieval narratives have more complex implications. In The Gift of Tongues, Christine Cooper-Rompato examines a wide range of sources to show that claims of miraculous language are much more important to medieval religious culture than previously recognized and are crucial to understanding late medieval English writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer and Margery Kempe.

Download or read book The Stigmata in Medieval and Early Modern Europe written by Carolyn Muessig and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Francis of Assisi's reported reception of the stigmata on Mount La Verna in 1224 is almost universally considered to be the first documented account of an individual miraculously and physically receiving the five wounds of Christ. The early thirteenth-century appearance of this miracle, however, is not as unexpected as it first seems. Interpretations of Galatians 6:17--I bear the marks of the Lord Jesus Christ in my body--had been circulating since the early Middle Ages in biblical commentaries. These works perceived those with the stigmata as metaphorical representations of martyrs bearing the marks of persecution in order to spread the teaching of Christ in the face of resistance. By the seventh century, the meaning of Galatians 6:17 had been appropriated by bishops and priests as a sign or mark of Christ that they received invisibly at their ordination. Priests and bishops came to be compared to soldiers of Christ, who bore the brand (stigmata) of God on their bodies, just like Roman soldiers who were branded with the name of their emperor. By the early twelfth century, crusaders were said to bear the actual marks of the passion in death and even sometimes as they entered into battle. The Stigmata in Medieval and Early Modern Europe traces the birth and evolution of religious stigmata and particularly of stigmatic theology, as understood through the ensemble of theological discussions and devotional practices. Carolyn Muessig assesses the role stigmatics played in medieval and early modern religious culture, and the way their contemporaries reacted to them. The period studied covers the dominant discourse of stigmatic theology: that is, from Peter Damian's eleventh-century theological writings to 1630 when the papacy officially recognised the authenticity of Catherine of Siena's stigmata.

Download or read book Infirmity in Antiquity and the Middle Ages written by Christian Krötzl and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-09 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume discusses infirmitas (’infirmity’ or ’weakness’) in ancient and medieval societies. It concentrates on the cultural, social and domestic aspects of physical and mental illness, impairment and health, and also examines frailty as a more abstract, cultural construct. It seeks to widen our understanding of how physical and mental well-being and weakness were understood and constructed in the longue durée from antiquity to the Middle Ages. The chapters are written by experts from a variety of disciplines, including archaeology, art history and philology, and pay particular attention to the differences of experience due to gender, age and social status. The book opens with chapters on the more theoretical aspects of pre-modern infirmity and disability, moving on to discuss different types of mental and cultural infirmities, including those with positive connotations, such as medieval stigmata. The last section of the book discusses infirmity in everyday life from the perspective of healing, medicine and care.

Download or read book A New World in a Small Place written by Robert Brentano and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2024-03-29 with total page 510 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Distinguished historian Robert Brentano provides an entirely new perspective on the character of the church, religion, and society in the medieval Italian diocese of Rieti from 1188 to 1378. Combing through a cache of previously ignored documents stored in a tower of the cathedral, he uses wills, litigation proceedings, fiscal accounts, and other records to reconstruct the daily life of the diocese. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1994.

Download or read book Routledge Revivals Women and Gender in Medieval Europe 2006 written by Margaret Schaus and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-12 with total page 2033 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 2006, Women and Gender in Medieval Europe examines the daily reality of medieval women from all walks of life in Europe between 450 CE and 1500 CE. This reference work provides a comprehensive understanding of many aspects of medieval women and gender, such as art, economics, law, literature, sexuality, politics, philosophy and religion, as well as the daily lives of ordinary women. Masculinity in the middle ages is also addressed to provide important context for understanding women's roles. Additional up-to-date bibliographies have been included for the 2016 reprint. Written by renowned international scholars and easily accessible in an A-to-Z format, students, researchers, and scholars will find this outstanding reference work to be a valuable resource on women in Medieval Europe.

Download or read book Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine written by Nancy G. Siraisi and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-05-15 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Western Europe supported a highly developed and diverse medical community in the late medieval and early Renaissance periods. In her absorbing history of this complex era in medicine, Siraisi explores the inner workings of the medical community and illustrates the connections of medicine to both natural philosophy and technical skills.

Download or read book Fallen Bodies written by Dyan Elliott and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2010-08-03 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Medieval clerics believed that original sin had rendered their "fallen bodies" vulnerable to corrupting impulses—particularly those of a sexual nature. They feared that their corporeal frailty left them susceptible to demonic forces bent on penetrating and polluting their bodies and souls. Drawing on a variety of canonical and other sources, Fallen Bodies examines a wide-ranging set of issues generated by fears of pollution, sexuality, and demonology. To maintain their purity, celibate clerics combated the stain of nocturnal emissions; married clerics expelled their wives onto the streets and out of the historical record; an exemplum depicting a married couple having sex in church was told and retold; and the specter of the demonic lover further stigmatized women's sexuality. Over time, the clergy's conceptions of womanhood became radically polarized: the Virgin Mary was accorded ever greater honor, while real, corporeal women were progressively denigrated. When church doctrine definitively denied the physicality of demons, the female body remained as the prime material presence of sin. Dyan Elliott contends that the Western clergy's efforts to contain sexual instincts—and often the very thought and image of woman—precipitated uncanny returns of the repressed. She shows how this dynamic ultimately resulted in the progressive conflation of the female and the demonic, setting the stage for the future persecution of witches.

Download or read book Medieval Religion written by Constance H. Berman and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Constance Hoffman Berman presents an indispensable collection of the most influential and revisionist work to be done on religion in the Middle Ages in the last two decades. Bringing together an authoritative list of scholars from around the world, this book is a comprehensive compilation of the most important work in this field. Medieval Religion provides a valuable service for all those who study the Middle Ages, church history or religion.

Download or read book Medicine and the Inquisition in the Early Modern World written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-07-01 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Medicine and the Inquisition offers a wide-ranging and nuanced account of the role played by the Roman, Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions in shaping medical learning and practice in the period from 1500 to 1850. Until now, learned medicine has remained a secondary subject in scholarship on Inquisitions. This volume delves into physicians’ contributions to the inquisitorial machinery as well as the persecution of medical practitioners and the censorship of books of medicine. Although they are commonly depicted as all-pervasive systems of repression, the Inquisitions emerge from these essays as complex institutions. Authors investigate how boundaries between the medical and the religious were negotiated and transgressed in different contexts. The book sheds new light on the intellectual and social world of early modern physicians, paying particular attention to how they complied with, and at times undermined, ecclesiastical control and the hierarchies of power in which the medical profession was embedded. Contributors are Hervé Baudry, Bradford A. Bouley, Alessandra Celati, Maria Pia Donato, Martha Few, Guido M. Giglioni, Andrew Keitt, Hannah Marcus, and Timothy D. Walker. This volume includes the articles originally published in Volume XXIII, Nos. 1-2 (2018) of Brill's journal Early Science and Medicine with one additional chapter by Timothy D. Walker and an updated introduction.

Download or read book Bishops Saints and Historians written by Robert Brentano and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-06-14 with total page 439 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout his career, Robert Brentano attempted to understand the nature and 'style' of ecclesiastical institutions in Italy and the British Isles, the specific qualities of saints and the communities that formed around them, and the ways in which seemingly cryptic archival remains of medieval administrative activity, as well as chronicles and lives, could reveal vital details about change and continuity in local and regional religious life and even 'the color of men's souls'. These issues are explored in the essays assembled in Parts I (Bishops) and II (Saints). Part III (Historians) brings together articles that examine the writing of history by both medieval authors and modern historians, and includes Brentano's reflections on his own practice as an historian. The introduction by W. L. North offers a brief biography and introduction to reading Brentano's works, followed by a complete bibliography of his publications.

Download or read book The Making of the Magdalen written by Katherine Ludwig Jansen and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2001-07-02 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Best known during the Middle Ages as the prostitute who became a faithful follower of Christ, Mary Magdalen was the most beloved female saint after the Virgin Mary. Why the Magdalen became so popular, what meanings she conveyed, and how her story evolved over the centuries are the focus of this compelling exploration of late medieval religious culture. Analyzing previously unpublished sermons, Katherine Jansen uses the lens of medieval preaching to examine the mendicant friars' transformation of Mary Magdalen, a shadowy gospel figure, into an emblem of action and contemplation, a symbol of vanity and lust, a model of perfect penance, and the embodiment of hope and salvation. She draws on diverse historical sources to reveal the laity's devotion to Mary Magdalen, which departed significantly from the friars' image of the saint, signaling a major development in popular religious practice and personal piety. Finally, the author comprehensively addresses the question of the House of Anjou's alliance with the Magdalen, and illuminates the relationship between politics and sanctity in southern France and Italy. Jansen shows how perceptions of the Magdalen merged with errors and misunderstandings to shape the social, spiritual, and political agendas of the later Middle Ages. She brings to life the rich complexity of medieval culture, which condemned female sexuality and women's preaching and yet popularized the veneration of Mary Magdalen as a former prostitute chosen by Christ to be the "apostle of the apostles," the first to witness and preach the Good News of the Resurrection.

Download or read book The Bride of Christ Goes to Hell written by Dyan Elliott and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2011-11-16 with total page 477 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The early Christian writer Tertullian first applied the epithet "bride of Christ" to the uppity virgins of Carthage as a means of enforcing female obedience. Henceforth, the virgin as Christ's spouse was expected to manifest matronly modesty and due submission, hobbling virginity's ancient capacity to destabilize gender roles. In the early Middle Ages, the focus on virginity and the attendant anxiety over its possible loss reinforced the emphasis on claustration in female religious communities, while also profoundly disparaging the nonvirginal members of a given community. With the rising importance of intentionality in determining a person's spiritual profile in the high Middle Ages, the title of bride could be applied and appropriated to laywomen who were nonvirgins as well. Such instances of democratization coincided with the rise of bridal mysticism and a progressive somatization of female spirituality. These factors helped cultivate an increasingly literal and eroticized discourse: women began to undergo mystical enactments of their union with Christ, including ecstatic consummations and vivid phantom pregnancies. Female mystics also became increasingly intimate with their confessors and other clerical confidants, who were sometimes represented as stand-ins for the celestial bridegroom. The dramatic merging of the spiritual and physical in female expressions of religiosity made church authorities fearful, an anxiety that would coalesce around the figure of the witch and her carnal induction into the Sabbath.

Download or read book Lived Religion and Gender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe written by Sari Katajala-Peltomaa and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-11-23 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study is an exploration of lived religion and gender across the Reformation, from the 14th–18th centuries. Combining conceptual development with empirical history, the authors explore these two topics via themes of power, agency, work, family, sainthood and witchcraft. By advancing the theoretical category of ‘experience’, Lived Religion and Gender reveals multiple femininities and masculinities in the intersectional context of lived religion. The authors analyse specific case studies from both medieval and early modern sources, such as secular court records, to tell the stories of both individuals and large social groups. By exploring lived religion and gender on a range of social levels including the domestic sphere, public devotion and spirituality, this study explains how late medieval and early modern people performed both religion and gender in ways that were vastly different from what ideologists have prescribed. Lived Religion and Gender covers a wide geographical area in western Europe including Italy, Scandinavia and Finland, making this study an invaluable resource for scholars and students concerned with the history of religion, the history of gender, the history of the family, as well as medieval and early modern European history. The Introduction of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license and is available here: https://tandfbis.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/rt-files/docs/Open+Access+Chapters/9781351003384_oaintroduction.pdf

Download or read book A Companion to Medieval Miracle Collections written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-09-06 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A companion volume for the usage of medieval miracle collections as a source, offering versatile approaches to the origins, methods, and techniques of various types of miracle narratives, as well as fascinating case studies from across Europe.

Download or read book Proving Woman written by Dyan Elliott and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-01-10 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Around the year 1215, female mystics and their sacramental devotion were among orthodoxy's most sophisticated weapons in the fight against heresy. Holy women's claims to be in direct communication with God placed them in positions of unprecedented influence. Yet by the end of the Middle Ages female mystics were frequently mistrusted, derided, and in danger of their lives. The witch hunts were just around the corner. While studies of sanctity and heresy tend to be undertaken separately, Proving Woman brings these two avenues of inquiry together by associating the downward trajectory of holy women with medieval society's progressive reliance on the inquisitional procedure. Inquisition was soon used for resolving most questions of proof. It was employed for distinguishing saints and heretics; it underwrote the new emphasis on confession in both sacramental and judicial spheres; and it heralded the reintroduction of torture as a mechanism for extracting proof through confession. As women were progressively subjected to this screening, they became ensnared in the interlocking web of proofs. No aspect of female spirituality remained untouched. Since inquisition determined the need for tangible proofs, it even may have fostered the kind of excruciating illnesses and extraordinary bodily changes associated with female spirituality. In turn, the physical suffering of holy women became tacit support for all kinds of earthly suffering, even validating temporal mechanisms of justice in their most aggressive forms. The widespread adoption of inquisitional mechanisms for assessing female spirituality eventuated in a growing confusion between the saintly and heretical and the ultimate criminalization of female religious expression.