Download or read book The Mystical Texts written by Philip Alexander and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2006-04-24 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Starting from a careful definition of mysticism, this volume argues that there is clear evidence for the practice of mysticism in the Community of the Dead Sea Scrolls. It offers a close reading of the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice, the Self-Glorification Hymn, and related texts, which constitute the Qumran mystical corpus. It discusses the nature of the mystical experience at Qumran, which was centred on union with the angels in offering praise to God in the celestial temple, and the means by which this union was achieved, through the communal chanting of highly-charged numinous hymns. It also argues that that the presence of mysticism at Qumran has important implications for the history of western mysticism. It means that Jewish mysticism began in priestly circles in Second Temple times, several centuries before the commonly accepted date. And the important form of Christian mysticism involving speculation on the angelic hierarchies, classically associated with Dionysius the Areopagite, had a pre-Christian Jewish forebear. Consequently Qumran mysticism belongs to the genealogy of Christian as well as of Jewish mysticism. This volume synthesizes and makes accessible a mass of technical research widely scattered in monographs and articles, and offers the reader a clear guide to the most recent scholarly work in the field.
Download or read book Approaching Medieval English Anchoritic and Mystical Texts written by Dee Dyas and published by DS Brewer. This book was released on 2005 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays suggesting new ways of studying the crucial but sometimes difficult range of medieval mystical material. This volume seeks to explore the origins, context and content of the anchoritic and mystical texts produced in England during the Middle Ages and to examine the ways in which these texts may be studied and taught today. It foregrounds issues of context and interaction, seeking both to position medieval spiritual writings against a surprisingly wide range of contemporary contexts and to face the challenge of making these texts accessible to a wider readership. The contributions, by leading scholars in the field, incorporate historical, literary and theological perspectives and offer critical approaches and background material which will inform both research and teaching. The approaches to Middle English anchoritic and mystical texts suggested in this volume are many and varied. In this they reflect the richness and complexity of the contexts from which these writings emerged. These essays are offered aspart of an ongoing exploration of aspects of medieval spirituality which, while posing a considerable challenge to modern readers, also offer invaluable insights into the interaction between medieval culture and belief. Contributors: E.A. Jones, Dee Dyas, Valerie Edden, Santha Bhattachariji, Denis Renevey, A.C. Spearing, Thomas Bestul, Liz Herbert McAvoy, Barry A. Windeatt, Alexandra Barratt, R.S. Allen, Roger Ellis, Ann M. Hutchison, Marion Glasscoe, Catherine Innes-Parker
Download or read book From the Material to the Mystical in Late Medieval Piety written by Racha Kirakosian and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-09-30 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The German mystic Gertrude the Great of Helfta (c.1256–1301) is a globally venerated saint who is still central to the Sacred Heart Devotion. Her visions were first recorded in Latin, and they inspired generations of readers in processes of creative rewriting. The vernacular copies of these redactions challenge the long-standing idea that translations do not bear the same literary or historical weight as the originals upon which they are based. In this study, Racha Kirakosian argues that manuscript transmission reveals how redactors serve as cultural agents. Examining the late medieval vernacular copies of Gertrude's visions, she demonstrates how redactors recast textual materials, reflected changes in piety, and generated new forms of devotional practices. She also shows how these texts served as a bridge between material culture, in the form of textiles and book illumination, and mysticism. Kirakosian's multi-faceted study is an important contribution to current debates on medieval manuscript culture, authorship, and translation as objects of study in their own right.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Mystical Theology written by Edward Howells and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 719 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection provides a guide to the mystical element of Christianity as a theological phenomenon. Part I offers a historical overview. Part II considers sources and practices of mystical theology. Part III examines conceptualities of mystical thought. Part IV explores contributions of mystical teaching to theology and metaphysics.
Download or read book Apocalypticism and Mysticism in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity written by John J. Collins and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2018-09-24 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The nature and origin of Jewish mysticism is a controversial subject. This volume explores the subject by examining both the Hebrew and Aramaic tradition (Dead Sea Scrolls, 1 Enoch) and the Greek philosophical tradition (Philo) and also examines the Christian transformation of Jewish mysticism in Paul and Revelation. It provides for a nuanced treatment that differentiates different strands of thought that may be considered mystical. The Hebrew tradition is mythical in nature and concerned with various ways of being in the presence of God. The Greek tradition allows for a greater degree of unification and participation in the divine. The New Testament texts are generally closer to the Greek tradition, although Greek philosophy would have a huge effect on later Christian mysticism. The book is intended for scholars and advanced students of ancient Judaism and early Christianity.
Download or read book The Scholarship on Spanish Mystical Literature written by Gloria Maité Hernández and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-12-06 with total page 80 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This critical survey examines the work of twentieth and early twenty-first century scholars about Spanish mystical literature. It particularly attends to how these scholars’ ideas were influenced by their notions of mysticism and Spain’s contested relationship to the Orient.
Download or read book The Relevance of Bernard Lonergan s Notion of Self appropriation to a Mystical political Theology written by Ian B. Bell and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2008 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Relevance of Bernard Lonergan's Notion of Self-Appropriation to a Mystical-Political Theology, Ian Bell takes on the issue of the separation of the interior and exterior lives that has come to dominate mystical theology over the years. The mystical life, he claims, is necessarily involved in the establishment of social structures and institutions that govern human living, and the work of Bernard Lonergan on the human subject provides a means by which the connection between the interior and exterior lives may be established. Because human persons operate in a consistent pattern regardless of a given moment's particularities, mystical experience is no longer relegated to so-called spiritual matters, and the insights of mystics may be applied to the Christian call to live as agents of love. With this connection in place, mystical theology and political theology come together in a theology that is both mystical and political.
Download or read book Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh written by Karma Lochrie and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2012-07-24 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Book for 1999 Karma Lochrie demonstrates that women were associated not with the body but rather with the flesh, that disruptive aspect of body and soul which Augustine claimed was fissured with the Fall of Man. It is within this framework that she reads The Book of Margery Kempe, demonstrating the ways in which Kempe exploited the gendered ideologies of flesh and text through her controversial practices of writing, her inappropriate-seeming laughter, and the most notorious aspect of her mysticism, her "hysterical" weeping expressions of religious desire. Lochrie challenges prevailing scholarly assumptions of Kempe's illiteracy, her role in the writing of her book, her misunderstanding of mystical concepts, and the failure of her book to influence a reading community. In her work and her life, Kempe consistently crossed the barriers of those cultural taboos designed to exclude and silence her. Instead of viewing Kempe as marginal to the great mystical and literary traditions of the late Middle Ages, this study takes her seriously as a woman responding to the cultural constraints and exclusions of her time. Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh will be of interest to students and scholars of medieval studies, intellectual history, and feminist theory.
Download or read book The Arnhem Mystical Sermons written by Ineke Cornet and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-12-06 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book on The Arnhem mystical sermons, Ineke Cornet offers the first in-depth study of the mystical and theological content of this sixteenth-century sermon collection from St. Agnes in Arnhem.
Download or read book The Mystic Way of Evangelism written by Elaine A. Heath and published by Baker Academic. This book was released on 2008-10-01 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although each generation searches for effective ways to be salt and light, Elaine Heath argues that the church is currently in an especially difficult place--a dark night of the soul. She calls the church to embrace, rather than ignore, its difficulties and find different ways of doing outreach. Heath brings a fresh perspective to the theory and practice of evangelism by approaching it through contemplative spirituality. By looking to mystics, saints, and martyrs of church history--such as Ignatius of Loyola, Julian of Norwich, St. Francis, John Wesley, Mother Theresa, and Henri Nouwen--she suggests we can discover ways of thinking about God that result in a life of outreach.
Download or read book The Mystical Language of Sensation in the Later Middle Ages written by Gordon Rudy and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-12-16 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First Published in 2002. This book is about the way medieval authors wrote about union with God and how they used language that refers to the senses to articulate their ideas about how a person can be one with God. Rudy argues that such explicit concepts of the spiritual senses are not sharply distinct from the ideas implicit in broader usage of sensory language in theological writings. These ideas are significant in the history of Christian mysticism, because language that refers to the senses bears directly on several ideas that are central to ideas about union with God.
Download or read book Mysticism and Space written by Carmel Bendon Davis and published by CUA Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "To understand both the theological and spatial parameters, Davis considers the mystical experience as being not only an exclusively "inner" apprehension but also an embodied one that takes place in what she designates as "mystical space." In conception mystical space is analogous to the literary figure of the mise en abyme, an impression of infinite regress that duplicates within all its layers the qualities of the larger, initiating structure without. Such a conception acknowledges that space has been widely conceptualized through the centuries, and it allows both medieval and contemporary theories of space to be employed in examining the mystics' lives and works".
Download or read book Translation and Mysticism written by Philip Wilson and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-05-27 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines how mysticism can tell us about translation and translation can tell us about mysticism, addressing the ancient but ongoing connections between the art of rendering one text in another language and the art of the ineffable. The volume represents the first sustained act of attention to the interdisciplinary crossover of these two fields, taking a Wittgensteinian approach to language, and investigates how mystics and their translators manage to write about what cannot be written about. Three questions are addressed overall: how mysticism can be used to conceptualise translation; the issues that mysticism raises for translation theory and practice; and how mystical texts have been and might be translated. Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Translator’s Task’ is considered in detail as a controversial example of dialogue. Translation examples are given in a range of languages, and six major case studies are provided, including a close reading of Exodus and an analysis of a recent radical translation of Lucretius. This book will be of interest to students and researchers in translation studies, mysticism studies, theology and literary translation, as well as practising translators.
Download or read book Gender and Text in the Later Middle Ages written by Jane Chance and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2019-11-07 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The women who spoke or wrote in the margins of the Middle Ages—women who were oppressed and diminished by social and religious institutions—often were not literate. Or, if they could read, they did not know how to write. Transforming or subverting Western and patristic traditions associated with the clergy, they also turned to Eastern and North African traditions and to popular oral theater, and focused in their choice of genre on lyric, romance, and confessional autobiography. These essays analyze their texts and reconstruct a medieval feminine aesthetic that begins a rewriting of cultural and literary history.
Download or read book Mystical Love in the German Baroque written by Isabella van Elferen and published by Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mystical Love in the German Baroque: Theology, Poetry, Music identifies the cultural and devotional conventions underlying expressions of mystical love in poetry and music of the German baroque. It sheds new light on the seemingly erotic overtones in settings of the Song of Songs and dialogues between Christ and the faithful soul in late 17th- and early 18th-century cantatas by Heinrich Sch tz, Dieterich Buxtehude, and Johann Sebastian Bach. While these compositions have been interpreted solely as a secularizing tendency within devotional music of the baroque period, Isabella van Elferen demonstrates that they need to be viewed instead as intensifications of the sacred. Based on a wide selection of previously unedited or translated 17th- and 18th-century sources, van Elferen describes the history and development of baroque poetic and musical love discourses, from Sch tz's early works through Buxtehude's cantatas and Bach's cantatas and Passions. This long and multilayered discursive history of these compositions considers the love poetry of Petrarch, European reception of petrarchan imagery and traditions, its effect on the madrigal in Germany, and the role of Catholic medieval mystics in baroque Lutheranism. Van Elferen shows that Bach's compositional technique, based on the emotional characteristics of text and music rather than on the depiction of single words, allows the musical expression of mystical love to correspond closely to contemporary literary and theological conceptions of this affect.
Download or read book Mystics written by William Harmless and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Mystics, William Harmless, S.J., introduces readers to the scholarly study of mysticism. He explores both mystics' extraordinary lives and their no-less-extraordinary writings using a unique case-study method centered on detailed examinations of six major Christian mystics: Thomas Merton, Bernard of Clairvaux, Hildegard of Bingen, Bonaventure, Meister Eckhart, and Evagrius Ponticus. Rather than presenting mysticism as a subtle web of psychological or theological abstractions, Harless's case-study approach brings things down to earth, restoring mystics to their historical context.
Download or read book Mystical Theology and Continental Philosophy written by David Lewin and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-05-18 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploration of the interface between mystical theology and continental philosophy is a defining feature of the current intellectual and even devotional climate. But to what extent and in what depth are these disciplines actually speaking to one another; or even speaking about the same phenomena? This book draws together original contributions by leading and emerging international scholars, delineating emerging debates in this growing and dynamic field of research, and spanning mystical and philosophical traditions from the ancient, to the medieval, modern, and contemporary. At the heart of which lies Meister Eckhart, perhaps the single most influential Christian mystic for modern times. The book is organised around significant historical and contemporary figures who speak across the intersections of philosophy and theology, offering new insights into key interlocutors such as Pseudo-Dionysius, Augustine, Isaac Luria, Eckhart, Hegel, Heidegger, Marion, Kierkegaard, Deleuze, Laruelle, and Žižek. Designed both to contribute to current trends in mystical theology and philosophy, and elicit dialogue and debate from further afield, this book speaks within an emerging space exploring the retrieval of the mystical within a post-secular context.
