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 Literature and Religion in the Later Middle Ages written by Siegfried Wenzel and published by Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (ACMRS). This book was released on 1995 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Motherhood Religion and Society in Medieval Europe 400 1400 written by Dr Conrad Leyser and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2013-07-28 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Who can concentrate on thoughts of Scripture or philosophy and be able to endure babies crying … ? Will he put up with the constant muddle and squalor which small children bring into the home? The wealthy can do so … but philosophers lead a very different life … So, according to Peter Abelard, did his wife Heloise state in characteristically stark terms the antithetical demands of family and scholarship. Heloise was not alone in making this assumption. Sources from Jerome onward never cease to remind us that the life of the mind stands at odds with life in the family. For all that we have moved in the past two generations beyond kings and battles, fiefs and barons, motherhood has remained a blind spot for medieval historians. Whatever the reasons, the result is that the historiography of the medieval period is largely motherless. The aim of this book is to insist that this picture is intolerably one-dimensional, and to begin to change it. The volume is focussed on the paradox of motherhood in the European Middle Ages: to be a mother is at once to hold great power, and by the same token to be acutely vulnerable. The essays look to analyse the powers and the dangers of motherhood within the warp and weft of social history, beginning with the premise that religious discourse or practice served as a medium in which mothers (and others) could assess their situation, defend claims, and make accusations. Within this frame, three main themes emerge: survival, agency, and institutionalization. The volume spans the length and breadth of the Middle Ages, from late Roman North Africa through ninth-century Byzantium to late medieval Somerset, drawing in a range of types of historian, including textual scholars, literary critics, students of religion and economic historians. The unity of the volume arises from the very diversity of approaches within it, all addressed to the central topic.
Download or read book The Western Church in the Later Middle Ages written by Francis Oakley and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 1985 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Francis Oakley addresses late-medieval church history in its own terms, pointing out not only discontinuities but also continuities with earlier medieval experience. "By doing so," he writes, "I hope to have avoided the distortions and refractions that occur when that history is seen too obsessively through the lens of the Reformation."
Download or read book Literature and Religion in the Later Middle Ages written by Richard Newhauser and published by Legare Street Press. This book was released on 2022-10-27 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
Download or read book The Quest for the Christ Child in the Later Middle Ages written by Mary Dzon and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2017-01-25 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beginning in the twelfth century, clergy and laity alike started wondering with intensity about the historical and developmental details of Jesus' early life. Was the Christ Child like other children, whose characteristics and capabilities depended on their age? Was he sweet and tender, or formidable and powerful? Not finding sufficient information in the Gospels, which are almost completely silent about Jesus' childhood, medieval Christians turned to centuries-old apocryphal texts for answers. In The Quest for the Christ Child in the Later Middle Ages, Mary Dzon demonstrates how these apocryphal legends fostered a vibrant and creative medieval piety. Popular tales about the Christ Child entertained the laity and at the same time were reviled by some members of the intellectual elite of the church. In either case, such legends, so persistent, left their mark on theological, devotional, and literary texts. The Cistercian abbot Aelred of Rievaulx urged his monastic readers to imitate the Christ Child's development through spiritual growth; Francis of Assisi encouraged his followers to emulate the Christ Child's poverty and rusticity; Thomas Aquinas, for his part, believed that apocryphal stories about the Christ Child would encourage youths to be presumptuous, while Birgitta of Sweden provided pious alternatives in her many Marian revelations. Through close readings of such writings, Dzon explores the continued transmission and appeal of apocryphal legends throughout the Middle Ages and demonstrates the significant impact that the Christ Child had in shaping the medieval religious imagination.
Download or read book Religion in the Medieval West written by Bernard Hamilton and published by Bloomsbury Academic. This book was released on 2003-08-29 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Western European civilization in the medieval centuries was a time of significant development as the ascendency of the Roman Catholic Church spread Christianity throughout Europe. This book examines the religious life of this formative period, the history of the institutional Church, and focuses on the interaction between the Church and secular members of society. This new edition has been updated, and includes new visual evidence and a glossary of technical terms.
Download or read book Medieval Religion and its Anxieties written by Thomas A. Fudgé and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-10-20 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the broad varieties of religious belief, religious practices, and the influence of religion within medieval society. Religion in the Middle Ages was not monolithic. Medieval religion and the Latin Church are not synonymous. While theology and liturgy are important, an examination of animal trials, gargoyles, last judgments, various aspects of the medieval underworld, and the quest for salvation illuminate lesser known dimensions of religion in the Middle Ages. Several themes run throughout the book including visual culture, heresy and heretics, law and legal procedure, along with sexuality and an awareness of mentalities and anxieties. Although an expanse of 800 years has passed, the remains of those other Middle Ages can be seen today, forcing us to reassess our evaluations of this alluring and often overlooked past.
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 Medicine Religion and Gender in Medieval Culture written by Naoë Kukita Yoshikawa and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2015 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of the relations between medical and religious discourse and practice in medieval culture, focussing on how they are affected by gender.
Download or read book The Transformations of Magic written by Frank Klaassen and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2015-06-26 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this original, provocative, well-reasoned, and thoroughly documented book, Frank Klaassen proposes that two principal genres of illicit learned magic occur in late medieval manuscripts: image magic, which could be interpreted and justified in scholastic terms, and ritual magic (in its extreme form, overt necromancy), which could not. Image magic tended to be recopied faithfully; ritual magic tended to be adapted and reworked. These two forms of magic did not usually become intermingled in the manuscripts, but were presented separately. While image magic was often copied in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, The Transformations of Magic demonstrates that interest in it as an independent genre declined precipitously around 1500. Instead, what persisted was the other, more problematic form of magic: ritual magic. Klaassen shows that texts of medieval ritual magic were cherished in the sixteenth century, and writers of new magical treatises, such as Agrippa von Nettesheim and John Dee, were far more deeply indebted to medieval tradition—and specifically to the medieval tradition of ritual magic—than previous scholars have thought them to be.
Download or read book Dissimilar Similitudes written by Caroline Walker Bynum and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-29 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From an acclaimed historian, a mesmerizing account of how medieval European Christians envisioned the paradoxical nature of holy objects Between the twelfth and the sixteenth centuries, European Christians used a plethora of objects in worship, not only prayer books, statues, and paintings but also pieces of natural materials, such as stones and earth, considered to carry holiness, dolls representing Jesus and Mary, and even bits of consecrated bread and wine thought to be miraculously preserved flesh and blood. Theologians and ordinary worshippers alike explained, utilized, justified, and warned against some of these objects, which could carry with them both anti-Semitic charges and the glorious promise of heaven. Their proliferation and the reaction against them form a crucial background to the European-wide movements we know today as “reformations” (both Protestant and Catholic). In a set of independent but interrelated essays, Caroline Bynum considers some examples of such holy things, among them beds for the baby Jesus, the headdresses of medieval nuns, and the footprints of Christ carried home from the Holy Land by pilgrims in patterns cut to their shape or their measurement in lengths of string. Building on and going beyond her well-received work on the history of materiality, Bynum makes two arguments, one substantive, the other methodological. First, she demonstrates that the objects themselves communicate a paradox of dissimilar similitude—that is, that in their very details they both image the glory of heaven and make clear that that heaven is beyond any representation in earthly things. Second, she uses the theme of likeness and unlikeness to interrogate current practices of comparative history. Suggesting that contemporary students of religion, art, and culture should avoid comparing things that merely “look alike,” she proposes that humanists turn instead to comparing across cultures the disparate and perhaps visually dissimilar objects in which worshippers as well as theorists locate the “other” that gives religion enduring power.
Download or read book Themes and Images in the Medieval English Religious Lyric written by Douglas Gray and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-07-05 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1972, Themes and Images in the Medieval English Religious Lyric discusses themes and images in religious lyric poetry in Medieval English poetry. The book looks at the affect that tradition and convention had on the religious poetry of the medieval period. It examines the background of the lyrics, including the Latin tradition which was inherited by medieval vernacular and shows how religious lyric poetry presents, through a rich variety of images, the significant incidents in the scheme of Christ’s redemption, such as the Annunciation, the Nativity, the Passion and the Resurrection. It also considers the lyrics which were designed to assist humanity in the task of living in a Christian life, as well as those which prepared them for death.
Download or read book Medieval Religion and Technology written by Lynn Townsend White and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1978-01-01 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays fra 1940-1975, med udgangspunkt i middelalderens teknologiske frembringelser, og videnskabsmænd.
Download or read book Piers Plowman and the Reinvention of Church Law written by Arvind Thomas and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2019-03-07 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is a medieval truism that the poet meddles with words, the lawyer with the world. But are the poet's words and the lawyer's world really so far apart? To what extent does the art of making poems share in the craft of making laws, and vice versa? Framed by such questions, Piers Plowman and the Reinvention of Church Law in the Late Middle Ages examines the mutually productive interaction between literary and legal "makyngs" in England's great Middle English poem by William Langland. Focusing on Piers Plowman's preoccupation with wrongdoing in the B and C versions, Arvind Thomas examines the versions' representations of trials, confessions, restitutions, penalties, and pardons. Thomas explores how the "literary" informs and transforms the "legal" until they finally cannot be separated. Thomas shows how the poem's narrative voice, metaphor, syntax and style not only reflect but also act upon properties of canon law, such as penitential procedures and authoritative maxims. Langland's mobilization of juridical concepts, Thomas insists, not only engenders a poetics informed by canonist thought but also expresses an alternative vision of canon law from that proposed by medieval jurists and today's medievalists.
Download or read book The Age of Reform 1250 1550 written by Steven Ozment and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2020-08-25 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Celebrating the fortieth anniversary of this seminal book, this new edition includes an illuminating foreword by Carlos Eire and Ronald K. Rittges The seeds of the swift and sweeping religious movement that reshaped European thought in the 1500s were sown in the late Middle Ages. In this book, Steven Ozment traces the growth and dissemination of dissenting intellectual trends through three centuries to their explosive burgeoning in the Reformations--both Protestant and Catholic--of the sixteenth century. He elucidates with great clarity the complex philosophical and theological issues that inspired antagonistic schools, traditions, and movements from Aquinas to Calvin. This masterly synthesis of the intellectual and religious history of the period illuminates the impact of late medieval ideas on early modern society. With a new foreword by Carlos Eire and Ronald K. Rittgers, this modern classic is ripe for rediscovery by a new generation of students and scholars.
Download or read book Revelation and the Apocalypse in Late Medieval Literature written by Justin M. Byron-Davies and published by University of Wales Press. This book was released on 2020-02-01 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This interdisciplinary book breaks new ground by systematically examining ways in which two of the most important works of late medieval English literature – Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Love and William Langland’s Piers Plowman – arose from engagement with the biblical Apocalypse and exegetical writings. The study contends that the exegetical approach to the Apocalypse is more extensive in Julian’s Revelations and more sophisticated in Langland’s Piers Plowman than previously thought, whether through a primary textual influence or a discernible Joachite influence. The author considers the implications of areas of confluence, which both writers reapply and emphasise – such as spiritual warfare and other salient thematic elements of the Apocalypse, gender issues, and Julian’s explications of her vision of the soul as city of Christ and all believers (the fulcrum of her eschatologically-focused Aristotelian and Augustinian influenced pneumatology). The liberal soteriology implicit in Julian’s ‘Parable of the Lord and the Servant’ is specifically explored in its Johannine and Scotistic Christological emphasis, the absent vision of hell, and the eschatological ‘grete dede’, vis-à-vis a possible critique of the prevalent hermeneutic.
