Download or read book Allegories of Love in Marguerite Porete s Mirror of Simple Souls written by Suzanne Kocher and published by Brepols Publishers. This book was released on 2008 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Medieval Women: Texts Contexts

Download or read book A Companion to Marguerite Porete and The Mirror of Simple Souls written by Robert Stauffer and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2017-04-11 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Even with growing popularity in the United States, there existed no English-language scholarly introduction to Marguerite Porete or her sole-surviving work Mirror of Simple Souls until now. The study of Marguerite and her work touches on so many disciplines – from religious and secular histories to theological and literary readings of her book – that the scholarship had often been lost in the divides between the disciplines. Our contributors are chosen from both sides of the Atlantic and from an array of disciplines in order to bridge this geographical and linguistic divide. The interdisciplinary nature of the interest in Marguerite and the Mirror and the implications her book has on medieval scholarship make a collection such as this companion ideal. Contributors are Marleen Cré, Imke De Gier, Dávid Falvay, Sean Field, Geneviève Hasenohr (with Zan Kocher), Jonathan Juilfs, Zan Kocher, Joanne Robinson, Elizabeth Scarborough, Robert Stauffer, Wendy R. Terry, and Justine Trombley.

Download or read book The Secret Within written by Wolfgang Riehle and published by . This book was released on 2018-05-15 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spiritual seekers throughout history have sought illumination through solitary contemplation. In the Christian tradition, medieval England stands out for its remarkable array of hermits, recluses, and spiritual outsiders--from Cuthbert, Godric of Fichale, and Christina of Markyate to Richard Rolle, Julian of Norwich, and Margery Kempe. In The Secret Within, Wolfgang Riehle offers the first comprehensive history of English medieval mysticism in decades--one that will appeal to anyone fascinated by mysticism as a phenomenon of religious life. In considering the origins and evolution of the English mystical tradition, Riehle begins in the twelfth century with the revival of eremitical mysticism and the early growth of the Cistercian Order in the British Isles. He then focuses in depth on the great mystics of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries--Richard Rolle (the first great English mystic), the author of The Cloud of Unknowing, Walter Hilton, Margery Kempe, and Julian of Norwich. Riehle carefully grounds his narrative in the broader spiritual landscape of the Middle Ages, pointing out both prior influences dating back to Late Antiquity and corresponding developments in mysticism and theology on the Continent. He discusses the problem of possible differences between male and female spirituality and the movement of popularizing mysticism in the late Middle Ages. Filled with fresh insights, The Secret Within will be welcomed especially by teachers and students of medieval literature as well as by those engaged in historical, theological, philosophical, cultural, even anthropological and comparative studies of mysticism.

Download or read book Toward a Theology of Eros written by Virginia Burrus and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2009-08-25 with total page 493 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What does theology have to say about the place of eroticism in the salvific transformation of men and women, even of the cosmos itself? How, in turn, does eros infuse theological practice and transfigure doctrinal tropes? Avoiding the well-worn path of sexual moralizing while also departing decisively from Anders Nygren’s influential insistence that Christian agape must have nothing to do with worldly eros, this book explores what is still largely uncharted territory in the realm of theological erotics. The ascetic, the mystical, the seductive, the ecstatic—these are the places where the divine and the erotic may be seen to converge and love and desire to commingle. Inviting and performing a mutual seduction of disciplines, the volume brings philosophers, historians, biblical scholars, and theologians into a spirited conversation that traverses the limits of conventional orthodoxies, whether doctrinal or disciplinary. It seeks new openings for the emergence of desire, love, and pleasure, while challenging common understandings of these terms. It engages risk at the point where the hope for salvation paradoxically endangers the safety of subjects—in particular, of theological subjects—by opening them to those transgressions of eros in which boundaries, once exceeded, become places of emerging possibility. The eighteen chapters, arranged in thematic clusters, move fluidly among and between premodern and postmodern textual traditions—from Plato to Emerson, Augustine to Kristeva, Mechthild to Mattoso, the Shulammite to Molly Bloom, the Zohar to the Da Vinci Code. In so doing, they link the sublime reaches of theory with the gritty realities of politics, the boundless transcendence of God with the poignant transience of materiality.

Download or read book Intimate Reading written by Jessica Barr and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2020-04-20 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Intimate Reading: Textual Encounters in Medieval Women’s Visions and Vitae explores the ways that women mystics sought to make their books into vehicles for the reader’s spiritual transformation. Jessica Barr argues that the cognitive work of reading these texts was meant to stimulate intensely personal responses, and that the very materiality of the book can produce an intimate encounter with God. She thus explores the differences between mystics’ biographies and their self-presentation, analyzing as well the complex rhetorical moves that medieval women writers employ to render their accounts more effective. This new volume is structured around five case studies. Chapters consider the biographies of 13th-century holy women from Liège, the writings of Margery Kempe, Gertrude of Helfta, Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Julian of Norwich. At the heart of Intimate Reading is the question of how reading works—what it means to enter imaginatively and intellectually into the words of another. The volume showcases the complexity of medieval understandings of the work of reading, deepening our perception of the written word’s capacity to signify something that lies even beyond rational comprehension.

Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Allegory written by Rita Copeland and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-03-25 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Allegory is a vast subject, and its knotty history is daunting to students and even advanced scholars venturing outside their own historical specializations. This Companion will present, lucidly, systematically, and expertly, the various threads that comprise the allegorical tradition over its entire chronological range. Beginning with Greek antiquity, the volume shows how the earliest systems of allegory developed in poetry dealing with philosophy, mystical religion, and hermeneutics. Once the earliest histories and themes of the allegorical tradition have been presented, the volume turns to literary, intellectual, and cultural manifestations of allegory through the Middle Ages and Renaissance. The essays in the last section address literary and theoretical approaches to allegory in the modern era, from reactions to allegory in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to reevaluations of its power in the thought of the twentieth century and beyond.

Download or read book The Door written by Magda Szabo and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2015-01-27 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of The New York Times Book Review's "10 Best Books of 2015" An NYRB Classics Original The Door is an unsettling exploration of the relationship between two very different women. Magda is a writer, educated, married to an academic, public-spirited, with an on-again-off-again relationship to Hungary’s Communist authorities. Emerence is a peasant, illiterate, impassive, abrupt, seemingly ageless. She lives alone in a house that no one else may enter, not even her closest relatives. She is Magda’s housekeeper and she has taken control over Magda’s household, becoming indispensable to her. And Emerence, in her way, has come to depend on Magda. They share a kind of love—at least until Magda’s long-sought success as a writer leads to a devastating revelation. Len Rix’s prizewinning translation of The Door at last makes it possible for American readers to appreciate the masterwork of a major modern European writer.

Download or read book The Pursuit of the Millennium written by Norman Cohn and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1970-05-15 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The end of the millennium has always held the world in fear of earthquakes, plague, and the catastrophic destruction of the world. At the dawn of the 21st millennium the world is still experiencing these anxieties, as seen by the onslaught of fantasies of renewal, doomsday predictions, and New Age prophecies. This fascinating book explores the millenarianism that flourished in western Europe between the eleventh and sixteenth centuries. Covering the full range of revolutionary and anarchic sects and movements in medieval Europe, Cohn demonstrates how prophecies of a final struggle between the hosts of Christ and Antichrist melded with the rootless poor's desire to improve their own material conditions, resulting in a flourishing of millenarian fantasies. The only overall study of medieval millenarian movements, The Pursuit of the Millennium offers an excellent interpretation of how, again and again, in situations of anxiety and unrest, traditional beliefs come to serve as vehicles for social aspirations and animosities.

Download or read book Love is a Fire written by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee and published by The Golden Sufi Center. This book was released on 2001-07-15 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on live talks and meetings with Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, this is an introduction to the passion and wisdom of the Sufi path of love. The call of the heart and how it draws us back to divine union is one of mankind's greatest secrets, and for the Sufi, this love is a fire that burns away all traces of separation. Vaughan-Lee teaches how to live this burning and describes stages of the path of love on the soul's journey home. Love Is a Fire includes descriptions of the "friends of God," early Sufi saints who burned with the fire of divine love, including Rumi, Ibn 'Arabi, and Rabi'a. It also introduces elements of the path and important tools that purify the wayfarer: tauba, the moment of the turning of the heart when the soul remembers its divine origin; dhikr, the central Sufi practice of remembrance of God through repetition of the name of God or a sacred phrase; meditation, a way of drowning thoughts in the fire of love; and dreamwork, a way of listening and attuning to the mystery of what is hidden within us—the stories of our deeper selves. This book is also available as an audio recording, Love is a Fire and I am Wood, published by Sounds True. “... forged in the fire of the heart, this is a book for all those who are looking for the direct way to connection with the Eternal Now. Simply to read this fine expression of a lifetime's longing is to feel aligned with the Divine Ground.” —Anne Baring, coauthor, The Divine Feminine “... a gift to all seekers, whatever path they are on.” —Andrew Harvey, author, Light Upon Light: A Celebration of Rumi

Download or read book The Divine Vision of Dante s Paradiso written by William Franke and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-08-19 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Canto XVIII of Paradiso, Dante sees thirty-five letters of Scripture - LOVE JUSTICE, YOU WHO RULE THE EARTH - 'painted' one after the other in the sky. It is an epiphany that encapsulates the Paradiso, staging its ultimate goal - the divine vision. This book offers a fresh, intensive reading of this extraordinary passage at the heart of the third canticle of the Divine Comedy. While adapting in novel ways the methods of the traditional lectura Dantis, William Franke meditates independently on the philosophical, theological, political, ethical, and aesthetic ideas that Dante's text so provocatively projects into a multiplicity of disciplinary contexts. This book demands that we question not only what Dante may have meant by his representations, but also what they mean for us today in the broad horizon of our intellectual traditions and cultural heritage.

Download or read book Mystics of the Christian Tradition written by Steven Fanning and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2005-06-29 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From divine visions to self-tortures, some strange mystical experiences have shaped the Christian tradition. Full of colourful detail, this book examines the mystical experiences that have determined the history of Christianity.

Download or read book Catherine of Siena written by Jeffrey F. Hamburger and published by Brepols Publishers. This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on the critical case of Catherine of Siena, the essays in this volume consider the role of texts, translations and images in various media in constructing and disseminating the cult of a saint in the late Middle Ages. How does one construct a saint and promote a cult beyond the immediate community in which he or she lived? Italian mendicants had accumulated a good deal of experience in dealing with this politically explosive question. The posthumous description of the life of Francis of Assisi written by the Master General of the order, Bonaventura, could be regarded as paradigmatic in this regard. A similarly massive intervention in the production and diffusion of a cult can be observed in the case of the Dominican tertiary, Catherine of Siena, who in many respects 'competed' with Francis of Assisi. Raymund of Capua, the Master General of the order, established the foundation for the dissemination of the cult by writing the authoritative life, but, but it was only the following generation that succeeded in establishing the cult.

Download or read book The Beguines of Medieval Paris written by Tanya Stabler Miller and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2014-05 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the thirteenth century, Paris was the largest city in Western Europe, the royal capital of France, and the seat of one of Europe's most important universities. In this vibrant and cosmopolitan city, the beguines, women who wished to devote their lives to Christian ideals without taking formal vows, enjoyed a level of patronage and esteem that was uncommon among like communities elsewhere. Some Parisian beguines owned shops and played a vital role in the city's textile industry and economy. French royals and nobles financially supported the beguinages, and university clerics looked to the beguines for inspiration in their pedagogical endeavors. The Beguines of Medieval Paris examines these religious communities and their direct participation in the city's commercial, intellectual, and religious life. Drawing on an array of sources, including sermons, religious literature, tax rolls, and royal account books, Tanya Stabler Miller contextualizes the history of Parisian beguines within a spectrum of lay religious activity and theological controversy. She examines the impact of women on the construction of medieval clerical identity, the valuation of women's voices and activities, and the surprising ways in which local networks and legal structures permitted women to continue to identify as beguines long after a church council prohibited the beguine status. Based on intensive archival research, The Beguines of Medieval Paris makes an original contribution to the history of female religiosity and labor, university politics and intellectual debates, royal piety, and the central place of Paris in the commerce and culture of medieval Europe.

Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Hildegard of Bingen written by Jennifer Bain and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-11-04 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores the extraordinary life and works of Hildegard of Bingen, medieval writer, composer, visionary, and monastic founder.

Download or read book Exploring Visual Literacy Inside Outside and Through the Frame written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-09-25 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This interdisciplinary exploration of visual literacy is a result of the discussions that arose at the 2011 Conference on Visual Literacy in Oxford. Consistent with the themes which surfaced at the conference, this collection of articles examines our ways of framing what we see.

Download or read book Women Writers of the Middle Ages written by Peter Dronke and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1984-01-12 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book gives a detailed picture of the contributions made by women writers to Western literature from the third century to the thirteenth. Many of the texts Peter Dronke presents and interprets have hitherto remained unknown, or virtually inaccessible; some have never been edited or translated before. The emphasis throughout is on personal testimonies, and on texts that have notable literary or intellectual interest. Thus the book affords many new insights into medieval literature, not only into the writings of renowned women such as Hrotsvitha or Heloise, but also into those of a number of neglected writers who are exceptional in their gifts and individuality. Already highly influential, Women Writers of the Middle Ages continues to be essential reading for specialists and students alike in medieval literature, medieval intellectual history, and women's studies.

Download or read book Orientalism and Religion written by Richard King and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-04-03 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Orientalism and Religion offers us a timely discussion of the implications of contemporary post-colonial theory for the study of religion. Richard King examines the way in which notions such as mysticism, religion, Hinduism and Buddhism are taken for granted. He shows us how religion needs to be reinterpreted along the lines of cultural studies. Drawing on a variety of post-structuralist and post-colonial thinkers, such as Foucault, Gadamer, Said, and Spivak, King provides us with a challenging series of reflections on the nature of Religious Studies and Indology.