Download or read book The Saint and the Chopped Up Baby written by Laura Ackerman Smoller and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2014-01-21 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vincent Ferrer (1350–1419), a celebrated Dominican preacher from Valencia, was revered as a living saint during his lifetime, receiving papal canonization within fifty years of his death. In The Saint and the Chopped-Up Baby, Laura Ackerman Smoller recounts the fascinating story of how Vincent became the subject of widespread devotion, ranging from the saint's tomb in Brittany to cult centers in Spain, Italy, France, Germany, and Latin America, where Vincent is still venerated today. Along the way, Smoller traces the long and sometimes contentious process of establishing a stable image of a new saint. Vincent came to be epitomized by a singularly arresting miracle tale in which a mother kills, chops up, and cooks her own baby, only to have the child restored to life by the saint’s intercession. This miracle became a key emblem in the official portrayal of the saint promoted by the papal court and the Dominican order, still haunted by the memory of the Great Schism (1378–1414) that had rent the Catholic Church for nearly forty years. Vincent, however, proved to be a potent religious symbol for others whose agendas did not necessarily align with those of Rome. Whether shoring up the political legitimacy of Breton or Aragonese rulers, proclaiming a new plague saint, or trumpeting their own holiness, individuals imposed their own meanings on the Dominican saint. Drawing on nuanced readings of canonization inquests, hagiography, liturgical sources, art, and devotional materials, Smoller tracks these various appropriations from the time of Vincent’s 1455 canonization through the eve of the Enlightenment. In the process, she brings to life a long, raucous discussion ranging over many centuries. The Saint and the Chopped-Up Baby restores the voices of that conversation in all its complexity.
Download or read book The Saint and the Chopped Up Baby written by Laura Ackerman Smoller and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2014-01-24 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vincent Ferrer (1350–1419), a celebrated Dominican preacher from Valencia, was revered as a living saint during his lifetime, receiving papal canonization within fifty years of his death. In The Saint and the Chopped-Up Baby, Laura Ackerman Smoller recounts the fascinating story of how Vincent became the subject of widespread devotion, ranging from the saint’s tomb in Brittany to cult centers in Spain, Italy, France, Germany, and Latin America, where Vincent is still venerated today. Along the way, Smoller traces the long and sometimes contentious process of establishing a stable image of a new saint. Vincent came to be epitomized by a singularly arresting miracle tale in which a mother kills, chops up, and cooks her own baby, only to have the child restored to life by the saint’s intercession. This miracle became a key emblem in the official portrayal of the saint promoted by the papal court and the Dominican order, still haunted by the memory of the Great Schism (1378–1414) that had rent the Catholic Church for nearly forty years. Vincent, however, proved to be a potent religious symbol for others whose agendas did not necessarily align with those of Rome. Whether shoring up the political legitimacy of Breton or Aragonese rulers, proclaiming a new plague saint, or trumpeting their own holiness, individuals imposed their own meanings on the Dominican saint. Drawing on nuanced readings of canonization inquests, hagiography, liturgical sources, art, and devotional materials, Smoller tracks these various appropriations from the time of Vincent’s 1455 canonization through the eve of the Enlightenment, in the process bringing to life a long, raucous discussion ranging over many centuries. The Saint and the Chopped-Up Baby restores the voices of that conversation in all its complexity.
Download or read book Catholic Spectacle and Rome s Jews written by Emily Michelson and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2024-02-27 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new investigation that shows how conversionary preaching to Jews was essential to the early modern Catholic Church and the Roman religious landscape Starting in the sixteenth century, Jews in Rome were forced, every Saturday, to attend a hostile sermon aimed at their conversion. Harshly policed, they were made to march en masse toward the sermon and sit through it, all the while scrutinized by local Christians, foreign visitors, and potential converts. In Catholic Spectacle and Rome’s Jews, Emily Michelson demonstrates how this display was vital to the development of early modern Catholicism. Drawing from a trove of overlooked manuscripts, Michelson reconstructs the dynamics of weekly forced preaching in Rome. As the Catholic Church began to embark on worldwide missions, sermons to Jews offered a unique opportunity to define and defend its new triumphalist, global outlook. They became a point of prestige in Rome. The city’s most important organizations invested in maintaining these spectacles, and foreign tourists eagerly attended them. The title of “Preacher to the Jews” could make a man’s career. The presence of Christian spectators, Roman and foreign, was integral to these sermons, and preachers played to the gallery. Conversionary sermons also provided an intellectual veneer to mask ongoing anti-Jewish aggressions. In response, Jews mounted a campaign of resistance, using any means available. Examining the history and content of sermons to Jews over two and a half centuries, Catholic Spectacle and Rome’s Jews argues that conversionary preaching to Jews played a fundamental role in forming early modern Catholic identity.
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 Poets Saints and Visionaries of the Great Schism 1378 1417 written by Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2010-11-01 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Poets, Saints, and Visionaries of the Great Schism, Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski looks beyond the political and ecclesiastical storm and finds an outpouring of artistic, literary, and visionary responses to one of the great calamities of the late Middle Ages.
Download or read book Saints Miracles and Social Problems in Italian Renaissance Art written by Diana Bullen Presciutti and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-03-31 with total page 730 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Diana Bullen Presciutti explores how images of miracles performed by mendicant saints-reviving dead children, redeeming the unjustly convicted, mending broken marriages, quelling factional violence, exorcising the demonically possessed-actively shaped Renaissance Italians' perceptions of pressing social problems related to gender, sexuality, and honor. She argues that depictions of these miracles by artists-both famous (Donatello, Titian) and anonymous-played a critical role in defining and conceptualizing threats to family honor and social stability. Drawing from art history, history, religious studies, gender studies, and sociology, Presciutti's interdisciplinary study reveals how miracle scenes-whether painted, sculpted, or printed-operated as active agents of 'lived religion' and social negotiation in the spaces of the Renaissance Italian city.
Download or read book Yolande of Aragon 1381 1442 Family and Power written by Zita Eva Rohr and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-04-29 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Yolande of Aragon is one of the most intriguing of late medieval queens who contrived to be everywhere and nowhere, operating seamlessly from backstage and center stage. She is acknowledged as having been shrewd and intelligent - an éminence grise whose political and diplomatic agency secured the throne of France for her son-in-law, Charles VII.
Download or read book Black Bride of Christ written by and published by Vanderbilt University Press. This book was released on 2021-04-30 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Teresa de Santo Domingo, born with the name Chicaba, was a slave captured in the territory known to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Spanish and Portuguese navigators and slave traffickers as La Mina Baja del Oro, the part of West Africa that extends through present-day eastern Ghana, Togo, Benin, and western Nigeria. Upon the death of her Spanish master, Chicaba was freed to enter a convent. The Dominicans of La Penitencia in Salamanca accepted her after she had been rejected by several other monasteries because of her skin color. Even in her own religious community, race put her at a disadvantage in the highly stratified social hierarchy of monastic houses of the era. Her life story is known to us through a document entitled Compendio de la vida ejemplar de la Venerable Madre Sor Teresa Juliana de Santo Domingo, which is the foundational documentary evidence in the case for beatification of this nun, and as such it is the most significant and comprehensive source of information about her. This volume, the first English translation of the Compendio, is a hagiography, an example of a biographical genre that recounts the lives and describes the spiritual practices of saints officially canonized by the Church, respected ecclesiastical leaders, or holy people informally recognized by local devotees. The effort to have Chicaba canonized continues today, as Fra-Molinero and Houchins explore in their introduction to the volume.
Download or read book Hagiography and the History of Latin Christendom 500 1500 written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-12-02 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The twenty-one essays of Hagiography and the History of Latin Christendom, 500-1500 employ innovative methods to unlock the historical potential of hagiographical sources and reach new discoveries about the medieval world that extend well beyond the study of sanctity.
Download or read book Transformations of Pelops written by András Patay-Horváth and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-05-18 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is the first monograph in English dedicated to the study of the Greek mythical hero Pelops. While popular in antiquity, Pelops’ popularity has since faded; this book presents a comprehensive treatment of his character and legacy. Ancient tradition held that Pelops was the son of Tantalus and the ancestor of the Atreids, Agamemnon and Menelaos, who appear in the Homeric poems as leaders of the Greek forces against Troy. After arriving in Greece from the east, Pelops was eventually worshipped in Olympia, became the eponym of the Peloponnese, and was celebrated as one of the founders of the Olympic Games. However, his character is morally problematic, his family were heavily condemned, and few tales about Pelops exist. Patay-Horváth takes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of this obscure figure, presenting and analyzing written sources and depictions of Pelops, the etymology of his name, the history of his mythical family, and the afterlife of his myths. Drawing on folklore and ethnography, art and archaeology, linguistics and geography, this volume provides a detailed and accessible overview of both old and new theories about Pelops, his descendants, and his legacy. Transformations of Pelops is suitable for students and scholars of ancient Greek history and mythology, classical philology, and archaeology.
Download or read book The Stigmata in Medieval and Early Modern Europe written by Carolyn Muessig and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-06 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 Late 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 Showing Time Continuous Pictorial Narrative and the Adam and Eve Story written by Laura Messina-Argenton and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-02-14 with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How does a visual artist manage to narrate a story, which has a sequential and therefore temporal progression, using a static medium consisting solely of spatial sign elements and, what is more, in a single image? This is the question on which this work is based, posed by its designer, Alberto Argenton, to whose memory it is dedicated. The first explanation usually given by scholars in the field is that the artist solves the problem by depicting the same character in a number of scenes, thus giving indirect evidence of events taking place at different times. This book shows that artists, in addition to the repetition of characters, devise other spatial perceptual-representational strategies for organising the episodes that constitute a story and, therefore, showing time. Resorting to the psychology of art of a Gestalt matrix, the book offers researchers, graduates, advanced undergraduates, and professionals a description of a large continuous pictorial narrative repertoire (1000 works) and an in-depth analysis of the perceptual-representational strategies employed by artists from the 6th to the 17th century in a group of 100 works narrating the story of Adam and Eve.
Download or read book Contextualizing Miracles in the Christian West 1100 1500 written by Matthew M. Mesley and published by Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature. This book was released on 2014-12-01 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together innovative research on miracles in the Christian West 1100-1500, and includes chapters on Anglo-Norman saints’ cults, late medieval Portugal and the legacy of medieval hagiography in the immediate Post-Reformation period. Contributors investigate miracle narratives in conjunction with broader socio-cultural ideals, practices and developments in medieval society. They also reassess the legacy of Peter Brown, challenge established dichotomies such as ‘medicine and religion’, and examine relics, lay beliefs and the liturgical evidence of a saint’s cult, moving beyond the traditional focus on canonization. Medical history features prominently alongside other approaches; these clarify the contexts of our sources, and demonstrate the methodological vibrancy in this field.
Download or read book How We Read written by Kaitlin Heller and published by punctum books. This book was released on 2019 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What do we do when we read? Reading can be an act of consumption or an act of creation. Our "work reading" overlaps with our "pleasure reading," and yet these two modes of reading engage with different parts of the self. It is sometimes passive, sometimes active, and can even be an embodied form. The contributors to this volume share their own histories of reading in order to reveal the shared pleasure that lies in this most solitary of acts - which is also, paradoxically, the act of most complete plenitude. Many of the contributors engage in academic writing, and several publish in other genres, including poetry and fiction; some contributors maintain an active online presence. All are engaged with reading's capacity to stimulate and excite as well as to frustrate and confuse. The synergies and tensions of online reading and print reading animate these thirteen contributions, generating a sense of shared community. Together, the authors open their libraries to us. This is how we read. Table of Contents // Suzanne Conklin Akbari / "Introduction: Practicing Reading, Reading Practice"Irina Dumitrescu / "Reading Lessons"Anna Wilson / "I Like Knowing What is Going to Happen"Suzanne Conklin Akbari / "Read It Out Loud"Jessica Hammer / "From When We Read"Lochin Brouillard / "De Vita Lochini, or Commentary on a Life of Reading"Chris Piuma / "How I Read"Stephanie Bahr / "How I Read, a History; or 'San Francisco Banking Contains No Trans Fats'"Alexandra Atiya / "Text to Speech"Jonathan Hsy / "Phantom Sounds"Kirsty Schut / "On Not Being a Voracious Reader"Kaitlin Heller / "Sleeping Under the Mountain"Jennifer Jordan / "Reading to Forget, Reading to Remember"Brantley Bryant / "Best Practice Tips and Strategies for Academic Reading to Maximize Your Time and Productivity"Kaitlin Heller / "Afterword: The Parlor Scene" KAITLIN HELLER is a postdoctoral fellow at Syracuse University and a former assistant editor at Del Rey Books. Between teaching courses on folklore and medievalism, Heller designs games, watches Midsomer Murders, and does the bidding of one large cat. SUZANNE CONKLIN AKBARI is Director of the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto, but would rather be working on her new project on medieval ideas of periodization, "The Shape of Time," and/or lying on the beach in North Truro. Her books include "Seeing Through the Veil: Optical Theory and Medieval Allegory" (Toronto, 2004), "Idols in the East: European Representations of Islam and the Orient, 1100-1450" (Cornell, 2009), and four collections of essays, including "How We Write: Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blank Page" (punctum, 2015). She is also a co-editor of the Norton Anthology of World Literature (4th ed.), and a master of structured procrastination.
Download or read book Sacrificing the Self written by Margaret Cormack and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2002-07-18 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Acts of martyrdom have been found in nearly all the worlds major religious traditions. Though considered by devotees to be perhaps the most potent expression of religious faith, dying for ones god is also one of the most difficult concepts for modern observers of religion to understand. This is especially true in the West, where martyrdom has all but disappeared and martyrs in other cultures are often viewed skeptically and dismissed as fanatics. This book seeks to foster a greater understanding of these acts of religious devotion by explaining how martyrdom has historically been viewed in the worlds major religions. It provides the first sustained, cross-cultural examination of this fascinating aspect of religious life. Margaret Cormack begins with an introduction that sets out a definition of martyrdom that serves as the point of departure for the rest of the volume. Then, scholars of Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, and Islam examine martyrdom in specific religious cultures. Spanning 4000 years of history and ranging from Saul in the Hebrew Bible to Sati immolations in present-day India, this book provides a wealth of insight into an often noted but rarely understood cultural phenomenon.
Download or read book Zealots for Souls written by Anne Huijbers and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2018-01-22 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Zealots for souls draws attention to the impact of the Observant reforms within the Order of Preachers, and ambitiously stirs up a broad scope of questions pertaining to the institutional narratives produced within the order between c. 1388 and 1517. Through the narratives and the forms of remembrance they fostered, the author traces the development of contemporary characteristics of the Dominican self-understanding. The book shows the fluid boundaries between the genres (order chronicles, convent chronicles, collective biographies), highlights the interplay between the narrative and the intended audience, addresses the complex question of authorship, and assesses the indebtedness of 'modern' (printed) narratives to older chronicles or biographical collections. The book demonstrates that the majority of the extant institutional narratives were written by Observant Dominicans, who strived for the internal reform of their order. They wrote history to justify their own reform agenda and therefore produced invariably partisan chronicles. The work's method is widely applicable and contributes to further reassessment of institutional narratives as sources for the analysis of religious and intellectual transformations.
Download or read book Baby Lore written by Rosalind Franklin and published by Diggory Press Limited. This book was released on 2005 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hundreds of superstitions and old wives tales from every corner of the world related to every aspect of pregnancy, birth, and baby care are collected in this volume. It covers folklore from determining baby's sex at conception to easing baby's teething pains.
