Download or read book The Strange Case of Ermine de Reims written by Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2015-06-05 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1384, a poor and illiterate peasant woman named Ermine moved to the city of Reims with her elderly husband. Her era was troubled by war, plague, and schism within the Catholic Church, and Ermine could easily have slipped unobserved through the cracks of history. After the loss of her husband, however, things took a remarkable but frightening turn. For the last ten months of her life, Ermine was tormented by nightly visions of angels and demons. In her nocturnal terrors, she was attacked by animals, beaten and kidnapped by devils in disguise, and exposed to carnal spectacles; on other nights, she was blessed by saints, even visited by the Virgin Mary. She confessed these strange occurrences to an Augustinian friar known as Jean le Graveur, who recorded them all in vivid detail. Was Ermine a saint in the making, an impostor, an incipient witch, or a madwoman? Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski ponders answers to these questions in the historical and theological context of this troubled woman's experiences. With empathy and acuity, Blumenfeld-Kosinski examines Ermine's life in fourteenth-century Reims, her relationship with her confessor, her ascetic and devotional practices, and her reported encounters with heavenly and hellish beings. Supplemented by translated excerpts from Jean's account, The Strange Case of Ermine de Reims brings to life an episode that helped precipitate one of the major clerical controversies of late medieval Europe, revealing surprising truths about the era's conceptions of piety and possession.
Download or read book The Strange Case of Ermine de Reims written by Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2015-05-28 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines Ermine de Reim's life in fourteenth-century France, her relationship with her confessor, her ascetic and devotional practices, and her reported encounters with heavenly and hellish beings.--Publisher's description.
Download or read book Motherhood and Meaning in Medieval Sculpture written by Marian Bleeke and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2017 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of women as mothers in medieval French sculpture.
Download or read book The Discernment of Spirits written by Wendy Love Anderson and published by Mohr Siebeck. This book was released on 2011 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: [Anderson] succeeds in neatly fitting together selected pieces of the history of discernment of spirits to provide a valuable, readable description of the contours of its evolution in the late Middle Ages. -- Debra L. Stoudt, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, The Medieval Review Late medieval Christians lived in a world of visions, but they knew that not all visions came from God: angels, demons, illness, nature, or passion could also inspire an apparent divine visitation. During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the involvement of visionaries in everything from reform movements to military campaigns to papal schisms raised the political and spiritual stakes of determining whether or not a vision was truly from God. In response, a diverse group of medieval thinkers - including men and women, clergy and laity, visionaries and theologians - gradually began to transform the loose patristic readings of Pauline discretio spirituum into a system with the potential to distinguish between true and false visions and between genuine and delusional visionaries. Wendy Love Anderson chronicles the historical, political, and spiritual struggles behind the flowering of late medieval mysticism and what came to be seen as the Christian doctrine of discernment of spirits.
Download or read book Fictive Orders and Feminine Religious Identities 1200 1600 written by Alison More and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fictive Orders and Feminine Religious Identities traces the story of pious laywomen in Europe from the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries, examining the ways these women were active and engaged in their social and intellectual worlds, while also tracing the formation of modern perceptions about gender roles and the reasons why they persisted.
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 Satan s Counterfeit Healing written by Lawrence E. Burkholder and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2019-09-30 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The Christian church worldwide has been taken prisoner by Satan’s counterfeit healing.” This statement is based on the author’s personal experience, modest exposure to the Toronto Blessing, observation of parachurch healing ministries, and extensive historical reconstructions. Satan’s Counterfeit Healing presents and evaluates Satan’s supernatural healing from the Paleolithic period (ca. 45000 BCE) to the contemporary church. The guiding thesis is that Satan and his demonic surrogates perform miracles which are evident as psi paranormal phenomena. These manifestations include physical and exorcistic supernatural healings. Paleolithic and Neolithic periods produced Great Mother goddess worship and healing, which have persisted ever since. These idolatries, combined with OT nature gods, were a backdrop to Jesus’ true miracles. For two thousand years of church history there’s been a tug-of-war between true and false healing. Mother goddess as Mariological shrine healing joined with natural and demonic magic, and esoteric energy psi. Alongside these the Holy Spirit has raised up genuine healers and their ministries. Modern healing is marked by energy counterfeits and faith healing, the latter especially accompanied by trance, false prophecy, and psi transformations. True divine healing can be recovered when Christians repudiate nature gods, reject false prophecy, and restore proper eschatology.
Download or read book Tempting the Tempter written by Amy Huesman and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2023-11-07 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tempting the Tempter considers how far fifteenth-century Italian mystics would go to imitate Christ, even in his encounters with the Devil in the desert. Elena of Udine, Caterina of Bologna, and Colomba of Rieti created their own desert experience through their austere devotional practices, and they suffered and overcame temptations from the Devil. This work explores how these women actively pursued encounters with the Devil, and how these private temptations prepared them for a public ministry of miracles, contributed to their perception as living saints, and allowed their biographers to promote them as true imitators of Christ, worthy of sainthood.
Download or read book The Sacred and the Sinister written by David J. Collins, S. J. and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2019-05-17 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inspired by the work of eminent scholar Richard Kieckhefer, The Sacred and the Sinister explores the ambiguities that made (and make) medieval religion and magic so difficult to differentiate. The essays in this collection investigate how the holy and unholy were distinguished in medieval Europe, where their characteristics diverged, and the implications of that deviation. In the Middle Ages, the natural world was understood as divinely created and infused with mysterious power. This world was accessible to human knowledge and susceptible to human manipulation through three modes of engagement: religion, magic, and science. How these ways of understanding developed in light of modern notions of rationality is an important element of ongoing scholarly conversation. As Kieckhefer has emphasized, ambiguity and ambivalence characterize medieval understandings of the divine and demonic powers at work in the world. The ten chapters in this volume focus on four main aspects of this assertion: the cult of the saints, contested devotional relationships and practices, unsettled judgments between magic and religion, and inconclusive distinctions between magic and science. Freshly insightful, this study of ambiguity between magic and religion will be of special interest to scholars in the fields of medieval studies, religious studies, European history, and the history of science. In addition to the editor, the contributors to this volume are Michael D. Bailey, Kristi Woodward Bain, Maeve B. Callan, Elizabeth Casteen, Claire Fanger, Sean L. Field, Anne M. Koenig, Katelyn Mesler, and Sophie Page.
Download or read book The Bedevilment of Elizabeth Lorentz written by Peter A. Morton and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2018-11-23 with total page 142 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Elizabeth Lorentz was a young maid servant in early modern Germany who believed herself to be tormented by the devil, and who was eventually brought to trial in 1667. The trial grappled with the question of whether Lorentz was a willing accomplice of the devil or suffering from melancholy as a result of her previous sins. To provide readers with historical context, Morton includes an introduction to the early modern issues of demonic pact, possession, and spiritual melancholy, and as a supplement, a contemporary record of demonic possession of another young woman. The Bedevilment of Elizabeth Lorentz provides excellent insight into the complexities of Protestant attitudes to melancholy and the Devil, and into the circumstances of young women in early modern Europe.
Download or read book Cursed Britain written by Thomas Waters and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-07 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The definitive history of how witchcraft and black magic have survived, through the modern era and into the present dayCursed Britain unveils the enduring power of witchcraft, curses and black magic in modern times. Few topics are so secretive or controversial. Yet, whether in the 1800s or the early 2000s, when disasters struck or personal misfortunes mounted, many Britons found themselves believing in things they had previously dismissed – dark supernatural forces.Historian Thomas Waters here explores the lives of cursed or bewitched people, along with the witches and witch-busters who helped and harmed them. Waters takes us on a fascinating journey from Scottish islands to the folklore-rich West Country, from the immense territories of the British Empire to metropolitan London. We learn why magic caters to deep-seated human needs but see how it can also be abused, and discover how witchcraft survives by evolving and changing. Along the way, we examine an array of remarkable beliefs and rituals, from traditional folk magic to diverse spiritualities originating in Africa and Asia.This is a tale of cynical quacks and sincere magical healers, depressed people and furious vigilantes, innocent victims and rogues who claimed to possess evil abilities. Their spellbinding stories raise important questions about the state’s role in regulating radical spiritualities, the fragility of secularism and the true nature of magic.
Download or read book A Companion to Observant Reform in the Late Middle Ages and Beyond written by James Mixson and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2015-06-02 with total page 445 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Observant reform of the religious orders remains one of the most important yet understudied religious movements of the later Middle Ages. This volume provides scholars with a current, synthetic introduction to the field, and suggests new avenues for future scholarship.
Download or read book Allegorical Bodies written by Daisy Delogu and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Visions of Deliverance written by Mayte Green-Mercado and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2020-01-15 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Visions of Deliverance, Mayte Green-Mercado traces the circulation of Muslim and crypto-Muslim apocalyptic texts known as joferes through formal and informal networks of merchants, Sufis, and other channels of diffusion among Muslims and Christians across the Mediterranean from Constantinople and Venice to Morisco towns in eastern Spain. The movement of these prophecies from the eastern to the western edges of the Mediterranean illuminates strategies of Morisco cultural and political resistance, reconstructing both productive and oppositional interactions and exchanges between Muslims and Christians in the early modern Mediterranean. Challenging a historiography that has primarily understood Morisco apocalyptic thought as the expression of a defeated group that was conscious of the loss of their culture and identity, Green-Mercado depicts Moriscos not simply as helpless victims of Christian oppression but as political actors whose use of end-times discourse helped define and construct their society anew. Visions of Deliverance helps us understand the implications of confessionalization, forced conversion, and assimilation in the early modern period and the intellectual and theological networks that shaped politics and identity across the Mediterranean in this era.
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 272 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 Hundred Years War Vol 5 written by Jonathan Sumption and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2023-08-29 with total page 837 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The eagerly anticipated final volume in Jonathan Sumption's prize-winning history of the Hundred Years War, 'one of the great historical undertakings of our age' (Dan Jones, Sunday Times). Triumph and Illusion is the final volume of Jonathan Sumption's epic history of the Hundred Years War. It tells the story of the collapse of the English dream of conquest, from the opening years of the reign of Henry VI, when the battles of Cravant and Verneuil consolidated their control of most of northern France, to the loss of all of England's continental dominions except Calais thirty years later. This sudden reversal of fortune was a seminal event in the history of the two principal nation-states of western Europe. It brought to an end four centuries of the English dynasty's presence in France, separating two countries whose fates had once been closely intertwined. It created a new sense of national identity in both countries. The legacy of these events would influence their divergent prospects for centuries to come. Behind the clash of arms stood some of the most remarkable personalities of the age: the Duke of Bedford, the English Regent who ruled much of France from Paris and Rouen; Charles VII of France, underrated in both countries, who patiently rebuilt his kingdom after the disasters of his early years; the captains who populate the pages of Shakespeare - Fastolf, Montagu, Talbot, Dunois and, above all, the extraordinary figure of Joan of Arc, who changed the course of the war in a few weeks at the age of seventeen.
Download or read book Performing women written by Susannah Crowder and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-31 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book takes on a key problem in the history of drama: the ‘exceptional’ staging of the life of Catherine of Siena by a female actor and a female patron in 1468 Metz. Exploring the lives and performances of these previously anonymous women, the book brings the elusive figure of the female performer to centre stage. It integrates new approaches to drama, gender and patronage with a performance methodology to explore how the women of fifteenth-century Metz enacted varied kinds of performance that extended beyond the theatre. For example, decades before the 1468 play, Joan of Arc returned from the grave in the form of an impersonator named Claude. Offering a new paradigm of female performance that positions women at the core of public culture, Performing women is essential reading for scholars of pre-modern women and drama, and is also relevant to lecturers and students of late-medieval performance, religion and memory.
