Download or read book Pastoral Care and Community in Late Medieval Germany written by Deeana Copeland Klepper and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2022-12-15 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pastoral Care and Community in Late Medieval Germany explores how local religious culture was constructed in medieval European Christian society through close study of a set of neglected, late fourteenth-century manuscripts. The Mirror of Priests is a pastoral work written by Albert, an Augustinian canon from the Bavarian market town of Diessen, to guide local priests in their work with parishioners. Multiple versions of the text in Albert's own hand survive and, by comparing them, Deeana Copeland Klepper shows how ostensibly universal religious ideals and laws were adapted, interpreted, and repurposed by those given responsibility to implement them, thereby crafting distinctive, local expressions of Christianity. The vision of Christian community that emerges from Albert's pastoral guide is one in which the messiness of ordinary life is evident. Albert's imagined parish was marked out by geographic and legal boundaries—property and jurisdictional rights, tithes, and sacramental responsibility—as well as symbolic realities. By situating the Mirror of Priests within Albert's physical and conceptual spaces, Klepper affirms the centrality of the parish and its community for those living under the rubric of Christianity, especially outside of large cities. Pivoting between the materiality of texts and the sociocultural contexts of an overlooked manuscript tradition, Pastoral Care and Community in Late Medieval Germany offers fresh insights into the role of parish priests, the pastoral manual genre, and late medieval religious life.
Download or read book Religion and Culture in Germany 1400 1800 written by Robert Scribner and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-10-18 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The late Bob Scribner was one of the most original and provocative historians of the German Reformation. His truly pioneering spirit comes to light in this collection of his most recent essays. In the years before his death, Scribner explored the role of the senses in late medieval devotional culture, and wondered how the Reformation changed sensual attitudes. Further essays examine the nature of popular culture and the way the Reformation was institutionalised, considering Anabaptist ideals of the community of goods, literacy and heterodoxy, and the dynamics of power as they unfold in a case of witchcraft. The final section of the book consists of three iconoclastic essays, which, together, form a sustained assault on the argument first advanced by Max Weber that the Reformation created a rational, modern religion. Scribner shows that, far from being rationalist and anti-magical, Protestants had their own brand of magic. These fine essays are certain to spark off debate, not only among historians of the Reformation, but also among art historians and anyone interested in the nature of culture.
Download or read book Defining the Holy written by Sarah Hamilton and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Holy sites, both public - churches, monasteries, shrines - and more private - domestic chapels, oratories - populated the landscape of medieval and early modern Europe, providing contemporaries with access to the divine. These sacred spaces thus defined religious experience, and were fundamental to both the geography and social history of Europe over the course of 1,000 years. But how were these sacred spaces, both public and private, defined? How were they created, used, recognised and transformed? And to what extent did these definitions change over the course of time, and in particular as a result of the changes wrought in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Taking a strongly interdisciplinary approach, this volume tackles these questions from the point of view of archaeology, architectural and art history, liturgy, and history to consider the fundamental interaction between the sacred and the profane. Exploring the establishment of sacred space within both the public and domestic spheres, as well as the role of the secular within the sacred sphere, each chapter provides fascinating insights into how these concepts helped shape, and were shaped by, wider society. By highlighting these issues on a European basis from the medieval period through the age of the reformations, these essays demonstrate the significance of continuity as much as change in definitions of sacred space, and thus identify long term trends which have hitherto been absent in more limited studies. As such this volume provides essential reading for anyone with an interest in the ecclesiastical development of western Europe from the thirteenth to the eighteenth centuries.
Download or read book Negotiating Community and Difference in Medieval Europe written by Scott Wells and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2009-05-06 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection builds on the foundational work of Penelope D. Johnson, John Boswell's most influential student outside queer studies, on integration and segregation in medieval Christianity. It documents the multiple strategies by which medieval people constructed identities and, in the process, wove the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion among various individuals and groups. The collection adopts an interdisciplinary approach, encompassing historical, art historical, and literary perpsectives to explore the definition of personal and communal spaces within medieval texts, the complex negotiation of the relationship between devotee and saint in both the early and the later Middle Ages, the forming of partnerships (symbolic, economic, devotional, etc.) between men and women across medieval Europe's considerable gender divide, and the ostracism of individuals and groups through various means including imprisonment, violence, and their identification with pollution. Contributors include: Diane Peters Auslander, Constance Hoffman Berman, Elizabeth A.R. Brown, Alexandra Cuffel, Anne M. Schuchman, Jane Tibbetts Schulenburg, Katherine Allen Smith, Kathryn A. Smith, Christina Roukis-Stern, Susan Valentine, Susan Wade, and Scott Wells.
Download or read book The Insight of Unbelievers written by Deeana Copeland Klepper and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the year 1309, Nicholas of Lyra, an important Franciscan Bible commentator, put forth a question at the University of Paris, asking whether it was possible to prove the advent of Christ from scriptures received by the Jews. This question reflects the challenges he faced as a Christian exegete determined to value Jewish literature during an era of increasing hostility toward Jews in western Europe. Nicholas's literal commentary on the Bible became one of the most widely copied and disseminated of all medieval Bible commentaries. Jewish commentary was, as a result, more widely read in Latin Christendom than ever before, while at the same moment Jews were being pushed farther and farther to the margins of European society. His writings depict Jews as stubborn unbelievers who also held indispensable keys to understanding Christian Scripture. In The Insight of Unbelievers, Deeana Copeland Klepper examines late medieval Christian use of the Hebrew Bible and Jewish interpretation of Scripture, focusing on Nicholas of Lyra as the most important mediator of Hebrew traditions. Klepper highlights the important impact of both Jewish literature and Jewish unbelief on Nicholas of Lyra and on Christian culture more generally. By carefully examining the place of Hebrew and rabbinic traditions in the Christian study of the Bible, The Insight of Unbelievers elaborates in new ways on the relationship between Christian and Jewish scholarship and polemic in late medieval Europe.
Download or read book Lichfield and the Lands of St Chad written by Andrew Sargent and published by Univ of Hertfordshire Press. This book was released on 2020-07-27 with total page 502 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book focuses on the period from the seventh to eleventh centuries that witnessed the rise and fall of Mercia, the great Midland kingdom, and, later, the formation of England. Specifically, it explores the relationship between the bishops of Lichfield and the multiple communities of their diocese. Andrew Sargent tackles the challenge posed by the evidential 'hole' at the heart of Mercia by synthesising different kinds of evidence - archaeological, textual, topographical and toponymical - to reconstruct the landscapes inhabited by these communities, which intersected at cathedrals and minsters and other less formal meeting-places. Most such communities were engaged in the construction of hierarchies, and Sargent assigns spiritual lordship a dominant role in this. Tracing the interconnections of these communities, he focuses on the development of the Church of Lichfield, an extensive episcopal community situated within a dynamic mesh of institutions and groups within and beyond the diocese, from the royal court to the smallest township. The regional elite combined spiritual and secular forms of lordship to advance and entrench their mutual interests, and the entanglement of royal and episcopal governance is one of the key focuses of Andrew Sargent's outstanding new research. How the bishops shaped and promoted spiritual discourse to establish their own authority within society is key. This is traced through the meagre textual sources, which hint at the bishops' involvement in the wider flow of ecclesiastical politics in Britain, and through the archaeological and landscape evidence for churches and minsters held not only by bishops, but also by kings and aristocrats within the diocese. Saints' cults offer a particularly effective medium through which to study these developments: St Chad, the Mercian bishop who established the see at Lichfield, became an influential spiritual patron for subsequent bishops of the diocese, but other lesser known saints also focused c
Download or read book The Oxford Guide to Middle High German written by Howard Jones and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 725 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Guide to Middle High German is the most comprehensive self-contained treatment of Middle High German available in English. It covers the language, literature, history, and culture of German in the period from 1050 to 1350 and is designed for entry-level readers, advanced study, teaching, and reference. The book includes a large sample of texts, not only from Classical works such as Erec, the Nibelungenlied, Parzival, and Tristan, but also from mystical writing, chronicles, and legal documents; the selection represents all major dialects and the full time span of the period. The volume begins with an introduction that defines Middle High German linguistically, geographically, and chronologically. Chapter 2 then provides a detailed exploration of the grammar, covering sounds and spelling, inflectional morphology, syntax, and lexis. Each section in this chapter begins with a summary of the main points, followed by detailed paragraphs for in-depth study and reference. Chapter 3 deals with versification, discussing metre, rhyme, lines of verse in context, and verse forms, and includes practical tips for scansion. Chapter 4 offers an account of the political and social structures of Medieval Germany and a survey of the principal types of texts that originated in the period. The final chapter of the book comprises over forty texts, each placed in context and provided with explanatory footnotes; the first two texts, to be taken together with the introductory grammar sections, are aimed at newcomers. A glossary provides full coverage of the vocabulary appearing in the texts and throughout the book.
Download or read book Heresy and Citizenship written by Eugene Smelyansky and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-09-27 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Heresy and Citizenship examines the anti-heretical campaigns in late-medieval Augsburg, Rothenburg ob der Tauber, Strasbourg, and other cities. By focusing on the unprecedented period of persecution between 1390 and 1404, this study demonstrates how heretical presence in cities was exploited in ecclesiastical, political, and social conflicts between the cities and their external rivals, and between urban elites. These anti-heretical campaigns targeted Waldensians who believed in lay preaching and simplified forms of Christian worship. Groups of individuals identified as Waldensians underwent public penance, execution, or expulsion. In each case, the course and outcome of inquisitions reveal tensions between institutions within each city, most often between city councils and local bishops or archbishops. In such cases, competing sides used the persecution of heresy to assert their authority over others. As a result, persecution of urban Waldensians acquired meaning beyond mere correction of religious error. By placing the anti-heretical campaigns of this period in their socio-political and religious context, Heresy and Citizenship also engages with studies of social and political conflict in late medieval towns. It examines the role the exclusion of religiously and socially deviant groups played in the development of urban governments, and the rise of ideologies of good citizenship and the common good. It will be of interest to scholars and students interested in medieval urban and religious history, and the history of heresy and its persecution.
Download or read book Devout Laywomen in the Early Modern World written by Alison Weber and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-10 with total page 568 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Devout laywomen raise a number of provocative questions about gender and religion in the early modern world. How did some groups or individuals evade the Tridentine legislation that required third order women to take solemn vows and observe active and passive enclosure? How did their attempts to exercise a female apostolate (albeit with varying degrees of success and assertiveness) destabilize hierarchies of class and gender? To the extent that their beliefs and practices diverged from approved doctrine and rituals, what insights can they provide into the tensions between official religion and lay religiosity? Addressing these and many other questions, Devout Laywomen in the Early Modern World reflects new directions in gender history, offering a more nuanced approach to the paradigm of woman as the prototypical "disciplined" subject of church-state power.
Download or read book A Cloister on Trial written by Gabriella Erdélyi and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-09 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1517, the usually tranquil friary in the Hungarian town of Körmend found itself at the centre of controversy when its Augustinian friars, charged with drunkenness, sexual abuses and liturgical negligence, were driven out and replaced with observant Franciscans. The agent of change in this conflict, cardinal Thomas Bakócz, claimed to be acting in the name of ’cloister reform’ motivated by a religious agenda, while the Augustinians portrayed themselves as the victims of a political game. Based on the surviving interrogations of a papal enquiry into these events, this book illuminates the tensions and potential conflict that lurked within the religious culture of a seemingly unremarkable and remote town. The story of the friary trial of Körmend provides a fascinating window into religion and society of Europe at the dawn of the Reformation, investigating the processes by which ordinary people emerge as historical agents from the written records. By focussing on their experiences as represented in the trial documents the book reveals the spaces and borders of individual and communal action within the dynamic of lay-clerical relations negotiated in a friary reform at the beginning of the 16th century. Furthermore, the moral nature of the accusations levelled at the Augustinians - and whether these were justified or instigated for political reasons - offers further insights into the nature of late-medieval Catholicism and the claims of Protestant reformers.
Download or read book Christianization and Commonwealth in Early Medieval Europe written by Nathan J. Ristuccia and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-02-09 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Christianization and Commonwealth in Early Medieval Europe re-examines the alterations in Western European life that followed widespread conversion to Christianity-the phenomena traditionally termed "Christianization". It refocuses scholarly paradigms for Christianization around the development of mandatory rituals. One prominent ritual, Rogationtide supplies an ideal case study demonstrating a new paradigm of "Christianization without religion." Christianization in the Middle Ages was not a slow process through which a Christian system of religious beliefs and practices replaced an earlier pagan system. In the Middle Ages, religion did not exist in the sense of a fixed system of belief bounded off from other spheres of life. Rather, Christianization was primarily ritual performance. Being a Christian meant joining a local church community. After the fall of Rome, mandatory rituals such as Rogationtide arose to separate a Christian commonwealth from the pagans, heretics, and Jews outside it. A Latin West between the polis and the parish had its own institution-the Rogation procession-for organizing local communities. For medieval people, sectarian borders were often flexible and rituals served to demarcate these borders. Rogationtide is an ideal case study of this demarcation, because it was an emotionally powerful feast, which combined pageantry with doctrinal instruction, community formation, social ranking, devotional exercises, and bodily mortification. As a result, rival groups quarrelled over the holiday's meaning and procedure, sometimes violently, in order to reshape the local order and ban people and practices as non-Christian.
Download or read book Writing Power in Anglo Saxon England written by Catherine A. M. Clarke and published by DS Brewer. This book was released on 2012 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores how power is shaped and negotiated in later Anglo-Saxon texts, focusing on how hierarchical, vertical structures are presented alongside patterns of reciprocity and economies of mutual obligation, especially within the context of secular, spiritual, literal or symbolic patronage relationships.
Download or read book Contesting Orthodoxies in the History of Christianity written by James Carleton Paget and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2021 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the pursuit of orthodoxy, and its consequences for the history of Christianity. Christianity is a hugely diverse and quarrelsome family of faiths, but most Christians have nevertheless set great store by orthodoxy - literally, 'right opinion' - even if they cannot agree what that orthodoxy should be. The notion that there is a 'catholic', or universal, Christian faith - that which, according to the famous fifth-century formula, has been believed everywhere, at all times and by all people - is itself an act of faith: to reconcile it with the historical fact of persistent division and plurality requires a constant effort. It also requires a variety of strategies, from confrontation and exclusion, through deliberate choices as to what is forgotten or ignored, to creative or even indulgent inclusion. In this volume, seventeen leading historians of Christianity ask how the ideal of unity has clashed, negotiated, reconciled or coexisted with the historical reality of diversity, in a range of historical settings from the early Church through the Reformation era to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. These essays hold the huge variety of the Christian experience together with the ideal of orthodoxy, which Christians have never (yet) fully attained but for which they have always striven; and they trace some of the consequences of the pursuit of that ideal for the history of Christianity.
Download or read book A Companion to the Medieval World written by Carol Lansing and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2012-10-11 with total page 603 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on the expertise of 26 distinguished scholars, this important volume covers the major issues in the study of medieval Europe, highlighting the significant impact the time period had on cultural forms and institutions central to European identity. Examines changing approaches to the study of medieval Europe, its periodization, and central themes Includes coverage of important questions such as identity and the self, sexuality and gender, emotionality and ethnicity, as well as more traditional topics such as economic and demographic expansion; kingship; and the rise of the West Explores Europe’s understanding of the wider world to place the study of the medieval society in a global context
Download or read book Marian maternity in late medieval England written by Mary Beth Long and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2023-10-03 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marian maternity in late-medieval England takes advantage of the fifteenth century’s intense interest in the Virgin Mary, the best-documented mother of the medieval period, to examine the constructions and performances of maternity in vernacular religious texts. By bringing together texts and authors that are not often discussed in tandem, this study offers a rich examination of the multiple factors at play as Marian material circulated among experienced devotional readers. Taking a close look at the private devotional reading of late-medieval patrons, the book shows how texts including Chaucer’s poetry, Margery Kempe’s Boke, and legendaries of female saints are saturated with indirect references to and imitations of the Virgin. Marian maternity in late-medieval England employs a matricentric feminist approach to discern how readers’ devotional literacies inform their understanding and imitation of the Virgin’s maternal practice. Attending to internal cues in the texts, to manuscript contexts, and to the evidence and content of readers’ multiple literacies, the author examines Marian maternity as both theological concept and imitable practice. The result is a book that explains late-medieval perceptions of Mary’s maternity and sets them against readers’ devotional, emotional and relational circumstances.
Download or read book Early Medieval Europe 300 1050 written by David Rollason and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-05-22 with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The centuries following the collapse of the Roman Empire saw extraordinary change across Western Europe - in institutions, social structure, rural and urban life, religion, learning, scholarship and art. This innovative textbook provides students coming to the study of Early Medieval Europe for the first time with the conceptual and methodological tools to investigate the period for themselves. It identifies major research questions and historiographical debates and offers guidance on how to engage with and evaluate the major documentary sources and the evidence of art history and archaeology. Ideally structured to support courses and classes in Medieval European history, the book's features include: Over 50 carefully selected maps and illustrations accompanied by explanatory commentary Detailed guidance on further reading with research questions to aid understanding Timelines and maps to orientate the reader in each chapter An extensive companion website providing practical study guidance, reference materials and access to further primary sources Offering a road map to the rich written and non-written sources for this period, and the exciting recent scholarship, this book is an essential guide for any student wishing to gain a deeper level of understanding and greater confidence in creative and independent historical thought.
Download or read book Literacy and Identity in Early Medieval Ireland written by Elva Johnston and published by Boydell Press. This book was released on 2013-08-15 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Much of our knowledge of early medieval Ireland comes from a rich literature written in a variety of genres and in two languages, Irish and Latin. Who wrote this literature and what role did they play within society? What did the introduction and expansion of literacy mean in a culture where the vast majority of the population continued to be non-literate? How did literacy operate in and intersect with the oral world? Was literacy a key element in the formation and articulation of communal and elite senses of identity? This book addresses these issues in the first full, inter-disciplinary examination of the Irish literate elite and their social contexts between ca. 400-1000 AD. It considers the role played by Hiberno-Latin authors, the expansion of vernacular literacy and the key place of monasteries within the literate landscape. Also examined are the crucial intersections between literacy and orality, which underpin the importance played by the literate elite in giving voice to aristocratic and communal identities.
