Download or read book Medieval Writings on Female Spirituality written by Various and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2002-05-28 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Biographies, poetic compositions, works that are mystical, prophetic, visionary, or meditative: the selections here reflect the developments in medieval piety, particularly in the link between female spirituality and the body. Included are the dramatic visionary writings of Hildegard of Bingen; letters and poems by Hadewijch expressing passionate love for God; and Marguerite Porete's allegorical poem "The Mirror of Simple Souls," a dialogue between Love and Soul that was condemned as heretical. Also included are biographies written by male ecclesiastics of women such as Christine the Astonishing, whose extraordinary behavior included being resurrected at her own funeral; revelations received by Bridget of Sweden, the first woman to found a religious order; and excerpts from The Book of Margery Kempe, in which Margery imagines herself as a servant caring for the Virgin Mary in her childhood. This volume, edited by Elizabeth Spearing, who also prepared some of the translations, features a rich introduction to the lives and religious experiences of its subjects, as well as full explanatory notes. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Download or read book Writing Religious Women written by Christiania Whitehead and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2000-01-01 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of commissioned essays explores women's vernacular theology through a wide range of medieval prose and verse texts, from saints' lives to visionary literature. Employing a historicist methodology, the essays are sited at the intersection of two discursive fields: female spiritual practice and female textual practice. The contributors are primarily interested in the relation of women to religious books, as writers, receivers, and as objects of representation. They focus on historical approaches to the question of women's spirituality, and generically unrestricted examinations of issues of female literacy, book ownership, and reading practice. The essays are grouped under four main themes: the influence of anchoritic spirituality upon later lay piety, Carthusian links with female spirituality, the representation of femininity in Anglo-Norman and Middle English religious poetry, and veneration, performance and delusion in the Book of Margery Kempe.
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 368 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.
Download or read book Medieval Writings on Female Spirituality written by Various and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2002-05-28 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Biographies, poetic compositions, works that are mystical, prophetic, visionary, or meditative: the selections here reflect the developments in medieval piety, particularly in the link between female spirituality and the body. Included are the dramatic visionary writings of Hildegard of Bingen; letters and poems by Hadewijch expressing passionate love for God; and Marguerite Porete's allegorical poem "The Mirror of Simple Souls," a dialogue between Love and Soul that was condemned as heretical. Also included are biographies written by male ecclesiastics of women such as Christine the Astonishing, whose extraordinary behavior included being resurrected at her own funeral; revelations received by Bridget of Sweden, the first woman to found a religious order; and excerpts from The Book of Margery Kempe, in which Margery imagines herself as a servant caring for the Virgin Mary in her childhood. This volume, edited by Elizabeth Spearing, who also prepared some of the translations, features a rich introduction to the lives and religious experiences of its subjects, as well as full explanatory notes. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Download or read book Women and Mystical Experience in the Middle Ages written by Frances Beer and published by Boydell Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Original and thought-provoking study of three medieval women mystics based on writings and biographical material.
Download or read book Fragmentation and Redemption written by Caroline Walker Bynum and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arguing that historians must write in a comic mode, aware of history's artifice, risks, and incompletion, Caroline Walker Bynum here examines diverse medieval texts to show how women were able to appropriate dominant social symbols in ways that allowed for the emergence of their own creative voices. By arguing for the positive importance attributed to the body, these essays give a new interpretation of gender in medieval texts and of the role of asceticism and mysticism in Christianity.
Download or read book From Virile Woman to WomanChrist written by Barbara Newman and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2011-12-16 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why did hagiographers of the late Middle Ages praise mothers for abandoning small children? How did a group of female mystics come to define themselves as "apostles to the dead" and end by challenging God's right to damn? Why did certain heretics around 1300 venerate a woman as the Holy Spirit incarnate and another as the Angelic Pope? In From Virile Woman to WomanChrist, Barbara Newman asks these and other questions to trace a gradual and ambiguous transition in the gender strategies of medieval religious women. An egalitarian strain in early Christianity affirmed that once she asserted her commitment to Christ through a vow of chastity, monastic profession, or renunciation of family ties, a woman could become "virile," or equal to a man. While the ideal of the "virile woman" never disappeared, another ideal slowly evolved in medieval Christianity. By virtue of some gender-related trait—spotless virginity, erotic passion, the capacity for intense suffering, the ability to imagine a feminine aspect of the Godhead—a devout woman could be not only equal, but superior to men; without becoming male, she could become a "womanChrist," imitating and representing Christ in uniquely feminine ways. Rooted in women's concrete aspirations and sufferings, Newman's "womanChrist" model straddles the bounds of orthodoxy and heresy to illuminate the farther reaches of female religious behavior in the Middle Ages. From Virile Woman to WomanChrist will generate compelling discussion in the fields of medieval literature and history, history of religion, theology, and women's studies.
Download or read book Writing Religious Women written by Christiania Whitehead and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of commissioned essays explores women's vernacular theology through a wide range of medieval prose and verse texts, from saints' lives to visionary literature. Employing a historicist methodology, the essays are sited at the intersection of two discursive fields: female spiritual practice and female textual practice. The contributors are primarily interested in the relation of women to religious books, as writers, receivers, and as objects of representation. They focus on historical approaches to the question of women's spirituality, and generically unrestricted examinations of issues of female literacy, book ownership, and reading practice. The essays are grouped under four main themes: the influence of anchoritic spirituality upon later lay piety, Carthusian links with female spirituality, the representation of femininity in Anglo-Norman and Middle English religious poetry, and veneration, performance and delusion in the Book of Margery Kempe.
Download or read book Holy Feast and Holy Fast written by Caroline Walker Bynum and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1988-01-07 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the period between 1200 and 1500 in western Europe, a number of religious women gained widespread veneration and even canonization as saints for their extraordinary devotion to the Christian eucharist, supernatural multiplications of food and drink, and miracles of bodily manipulation, including stigmata and inedia (living without eating). The occurrence of such phenomena sheds much light on the nature of medieval society and medieval religion. It also forms a chapter in the history of women. Previous scholars have occasionally noted the various phenomena in isolation from each other and have sometimes applied modern medical or psychological theories to them. Using materials based on saints' lives and the religious and mystical writings of medieval women and men, Caroline Walker Bynum uncovers the pattern lying behind these aspects of women's religiosity and behind the fascination men and women felt for such miracles and devotional practices. She argues that food lies at the heart of much of women's piety. Women renounced ordinary food through fasting in order to prepare for receiving extraordinary food in the eucharist. They also offered themselves as food in miracles of feeding and bodily manipulation. Providing both functionalist and phenomenological explanations, Bynum explores the ways in which food practices enabled women to exert control within the family and to define their religious vocations. She also describes what women meant by seeing their own bodies and God's body as food and what men meant when they too associated women with food and flesh. The author's interpretation of women's piety offers a new view of the nature of medieval asceticism and, drawing upon both anthropology and feminist theory, she illuminates the distinctive features of women's use of symbols. Rejecting presentist interpretations of women as exploited or masochistic, she shows the power and creativity of women's writing and women's lives.
Download or read book Jesus as Mother written by Caroline Walker Bynum and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-09-01 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Introduction, by Caroline Walker Bynum: The opportunity to rethink and republish several of my early articles in combination with a new essay on the thirteenth century has led me to consider the continuity-both of argument and of approach-that underlies them. In one sense, their interrelationship is obvious. The first two address a question that was more in the forefront of scholarship a dozen years ago than it is today: the question of differences among religious orders. These two essays set out a method of reading texts for imagery and borrowings as well as for spiritual teaching in order to determine whether individuals who live in different institutional settings hold differing assumptions about the significance of their lives. The essays apply the method to the broader question of differences between regular canons and monks and the narrower question of differences between one kind of monk--the Cistercians--and other religious groups, monastic and nonmonastic, of the twelfth century. The third essay draws on some of the themes of the first two, particularly the discussion of canonical and Cistercian conceptions of the individual brother as example, to suggest an interpretation of twelfth-century religious life as concerned with the nature of groups as well as with affective expression. The fourth essay, again on Cistercian monks, elaborates themes of the first three. Its subsidiary goals are to provide further evidence on distinctively Cistercian attitudes and to elaborate the Cistercian ambivalence about vocation that I delineate in the essay on conceptions of community. It also raises questions that have now become popular in nonacademic as well as academic circles: what significance should we give to the increase of feminine imagery in twelfth-century religious writing by males? Can we learn anything about distinctively male or female spiritualities from this feminization of language? The fifth essay differs from the others in turning to the thirteenth century rather than the twelfth, to women rather than men, to detailed analysis of many themes in a few thinkers rather than one theme in many writers; it is nonetheless based on the conclusions of the earlier studies. The sense of monastic vocation and of the priesthood, of the authority of God and self, and of the significance of gender that I find in the three great mystics of late thirteenth-century Helfta can be understood only against the background of the growing twelfth- and thirteenth-century concern for evangelism and for an approachable God, which are the basic themes of the first four essays. Such connections between the essays will be clear to anyone who reads them. There are, however, deeper methodological and interpretive continuities among them that I wish to underline here. For these studies constitute a plea for an approach to medieval spirituality that is not now--and perhaps has never been--dominant in medieval scholarship. They also provide an interpretation of the religious life of the high Middle Ages that runs against the grain of recent emphases on the emergence of "lay spirituality." I therefore propose to give, as introduction, both a discussion of recent approaches to medieval piety and a short sketch of the religious history of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, emphasizing those themes that are the context for my specific investigations. I do not want to be misunderstood. In providing here a discussion of approaches to and trends in medieval religion I am not claiming that the studies that follow constitute a general history nor that my method should replace that of social, institutional, and intellectual historians. A handful of Cistercians does not typify the twelfth century, nor three nuns the thirteenth. Religious imagery, on which I concentrate, does not tell us how people lived. But because these essays approach texts in a way others have not done, focus on imagery others have not found important, and insist, as others have not insisted, on comparing groups to other groups (e.g., comparing what is peculiarly male to what is female as well as vice versa), I want to call attention to my approach to and my interpretation of the high Middle Ages in the hope of encouraging others to ask similar questions.
Download or read book Visions and Longings written by Monica Furlong and published by Shambhala Publications. This book was released on 1997-04-15 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The women mystics of medieval Europe represent the very first feminine voices heard in a world where women were nearly silent. As such, they are striking and unusual, strange, powerful and urgent. Monica Furlong uses key selections from among these women's own writings and writings about them by their contemporaries, along with her own assessment of them, to open up their contributions to a wide popular audience. The eleven women represented in this anthology were housewives, visionaries, abbesses, beguines, recluses, and nuns who wrote between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries. They include: • Héloïse, the scholar and abbess, whose letters to Abelard are treasure of medieval literature • Hildegard of Bingen, the visionary Rhineland nun • Clare of Assisi, the close friend of Saint Francis and founder of the Poor Clares • Catherine of Siena, an influential spiritual counselor whose book, Dialogue, consists of a debate between herself and God • Julian of Norwich, the English hermitess who spent the greater part of her life meditating on and coming to understand the striking visions she received as a young woman • and many others
Download or read book Proving Woman written by and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 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 influen.
Download or read book The Virgin Mary s Book at the Annunciation written by Laura Saetveit Miles and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2020 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An overlooked aspect of the iconography of the Annunciation investigated - Mary's book.
Download or read book The Female Mystic written by Andrea Janelle Dickens and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2009-05-30 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Middle Ages saw a flourishing of mysticism that was astonishing for its richness and distinctiveness. The medieval period was unlike any other period of Christianity in producing people who frequently claimed visions of Christ and Mary, uttered prophecies, gave voice to ecstatic experiences, recited poems and songs said to emanate directly from God and changed their ways of life as a result of these special revelations. Many recipients of these alleged divine gifts were women. Yet the female contribution to western Europe's intellectual and religious development is still not well understood. Popular or lay religion has been overshadowed by academic theology, which was predominantly the theology of men. This timely book rectifies the neglect by examining a number of women whose lives exemplify traditions which were central to medieval theology but whose contributions have tended to be dismissed as 'merely spiritual' by today's scholars. In their different ways, visionaries like Richeldis de Faverches (founder of the Holy House at Walsingham, or 'England's Nazareth'), the learned Hildegard of Bingen, Hadewijch of Brabant (exemplary voice of the Beguine tradition of love mysticism), charismatic traveller and pilgrim Margery Kempe and anchoress Julian of Norwich all challenged traditional male scholastic theology. Designed for the use of undergraduate student and general reader alike, this attractive survey provides an introduction to thirteen remarkable women and sets their ideas in context.
Download or read book Medieval Women Mystics written by Elizabeth Ruth Obbard and published by . This book was released on 2007-10 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While women's contribution to spirituality has often been overlooked or minimized in the past, there is a vital and growing interest in it today. Essential reading for anyone interested in medieval and/or women's spirituality and church history.
Download or read book The Book of Margery Kempe written by Margery Kempe and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 1985 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of the eventful and controversial life of Margery Kempe - wife, mother, businesswoman, pilgrim and visionary - is the earliest surviving autobiography in English. Here Kempe (c.1373-c.1440) recounts in vivid, unembarrassed detail the madness that followed the birth of the first of her fourteen children, the failure of her brewery business, her dramatic call to the spiritual life, her visions and uncontrollable tears, the struggle to convert her husband to a vow of chastity and her pilgrimages to Europe and the Holy Land. Margery Kempe could not read or write, and dictated her remarkable story late in life. It remains an extraordinary record of human faith and a portrait of a medieval woman of unforgettable character and courage.
Download or read book Gender and Exemplarity in Medieval and Early Modern Spain written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-09-07 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gender and Exemplarity in Medieval and Early Modern Spain gathers a series of studies on the interplay between gender, sanctity and exemplarity in regard to literary production in the Iberian peninsula. The first section examines how women were con¬strued as saintly examples through narratives, mostly composed by male writers; the second focuses on the use made of exemplary life-accounts by women writers in order to fashion their own social identity and their role as authors. The volume includes studies on relevant models (Mary Magdalen, Virgin Mary, living saints), means of transmission, sponsorship and agency (reading circles, print, patronage), and female writers (Leonor López de Córdoba, Isabel de Villena, Teresa of Ávila) involved in creating textual exemplars for women. Contributors are: Pablo Acosta-García, Andrew M. Beresford, Jimena Gamba Corradine, Ryan D. Giles, María Morrás, Lesley K. Twomey, Roa Vidal Doval, and Christopher van Ginhoven Rey.
