Download or read book The Revelations of St Birgitta of Sweden The heavenly emperor s book to kings the rule and minor works written by Saint Bridget (of Sweden) and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2006 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: St. Birgitta of Sweden was one of the most charismatic and influential female visionaries of the later Middle Ages. Her revelations influenced the spiritual lives of many individuals including Martin Luther. Interest in Birgitta has grown recently and she is now admired as a powerful voice and prophet of reform.
Download or read book The Revelations of St Birgitta of Sweden Volume 4 written by Bridget Morris and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015-08-19 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: St. Birgitta of Sweden (1303-1373, canonized 1391) was one of the most charismatic and influential female visionaries of the later Middle Ages. Altogether, she received some 700 revelations, dealing with subjects ranging from meditations on the human condition, domestic affairs in Sweden, and ecclesiastical matters in Rome, to revelations in praise of the Incarnation and devotion to the Virgin. Her Revelations, collected and ordered by her confessors, circulated widely throughout Europe and long after her death. Many eminent individuals, including Cardinal Juan Torquemada, Jean Gerson, and Martin Luther, read and commented on her writings, which influenced the spiritual lives of countless individuals. Birgitta was also the founder of a new monastic order, which still exists today. She is the patron saint of Sweden, and in 2000 was declared (with Catherine of Siena and Edith Stein) co-patroness of Europe. Birgitta's Revelations present her as a commanding and dauntless visionary who develops a contemplative mysticism that is always interwoven with social engagement and a commitment to the salvation of the world. The varied styles of her revelations are dominated by frequent juxtapositions of memorable images and allegories that illustrate her fierce and fertile imagination, her sharp powers of observation and understanding, and her passionate and receptive storytelling powers. This fourth and final volume of the translation of the Revelations of St. Birgitta of Sweden, comprises The Heavenly Emperor's Book to Kings, The Rule, and Minor Works. While the complete collection of Birgitta's books--called Liber caelestis--ends with Books VII, the eighth book, also referred to as The Heavenly Emperor's Book to Kings, was added after her death. It was compiled by Alfonso of Jaén, and is prefaced by his own treatise, titled The Hermit's Letter to Kings, which examines the ways in which revelations are tested and proven to be true visions conferred by the Holy Spirit. This volume also contains the Birgittine Rule, the Matins readings intended for the nuns, four prayers, and a collection of scattered revelations that lie on the periphery of the main corpus of texts. The translation is based on the recently completed critical edition of the Latin text and promises to be the standard English translation of the Revelations for years to come.
Download or read book Touching Devotional Practices and Visionary Experience in the Late Middle Ages written by David Carrillo-Rangel and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2019-12-16 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book addresses the history of the senses in relation to affective piety and its role in devotional practices in the late Middle Ages, focusing on the sense of touch. It argues that only by deeply analysing this specific context of perception can the full significance of sensory religious experience in the Late Middle Ages be understood. Considering the centrality of the body to medieval society and Christianity, this collection explores a range of devotional practices, mainly relating to the Passion of Christ, and features manuscripts, works of devotional literature, art, woodcuts and judicial records. It brings together a multidisciplinary group of scholars to offer a variety of methodological approaches, in order to understand how touch was encoded, evoked and purposefully used. The book further considers how touch was related to the medieval theory of perception, examining its relation to the inner and outer senses through the eyes of visionaries, mystics, theologians and confessors, not only as praxis but from different theoretical points of view. While considered the most basic of spiritual experience, the chapters in this book highlight the all-pervasive presence of touch and the significance of ‘affective piety’ to Late Medieval Christians. Chapter 3: Drama, Performance and Touch in the Medieval Convent and Beyond is Open Access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com
Download or read book Queenship Gender and Reputation in the Medieval and Early Modern West 1060 1600 written by Zita Eva Rohr and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-10-08 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited collection opens new ways to look at queenship in areas and countries not usually studied and reflects the increasingly interdisciplinary work and geographic range of the field. This book is a forerunner in queenship and re-invents the reputations of the women and some of the men. The contributors answers questions about the nature of queenship, reputation of queens, and gender roles in the medieval and early modern west. The essays question the viability of propaganda, gossip, and rumor that still characterizes some queens in modern histories. The wide geographic range covered by the contributors moves queenship studies beyond France and England to understudied places such as Sweden and Hungary. Even the essays on more familiar countries explores areas not usually studied, such as the role of Edward II’s stepmother, Margaret of France in Gaveston’s downfall. The chapters clearly have a common thread and the editors’ summary and description of the collection is valuable in assisting the reader. The collection is divided into two sections “Biography, Gossip, and History” and “Politics, Ambition, and Scandal.” The editors and contributors, including Zita Eva Rohr and Elena Woodacre, are scholars at the top of their field and several and engage and debate with recent scholarship. This collection will appeal internationally to literary scholars and gender studies scholars as well historians interested in the countries included in the collection.
Download or read book Cushions Kitchens and Christ written by Louise Campion and published by University of Wales Press. This book was released on 2022-01-15 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book represents the first full-length study of the prevalence of domestic imagery in late medieval religious literature. It examines as yet understudied patterns of household imagery and allegory across four fifteenth-century spiritual texts, all of which are Middle English translations of earlier Latin works. These texts are drawn from a range of popular genres of medieval religious writing, including the spiritual guidance text, Life of Christ, and collection of revelations received by visionary women. All of the texts discussed in this book have identifiable late medieval readers, which further enables a discussion of the way in which these book users might have responded to the domestic images in each one. This is a hugely important area of enquiry, as the literal late medieval household was becoming increasingly culturally important during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and these texts’ frequent recourse to domestic imagery would have been especially pertinent.
Download or read book The Quest for the Christ Child in the Later Middle Ages written by Mary Dzon and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2017-03-09 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beginning in the twelfth century, clergy and laity alike started wondering with intensity about the historical and developmental details of Jesus' early life. Was the Christ Child like other children, whose characteristics and capabilities depended on their age? Was he sweet and tender, or formidable and powerful? Not finding sufficient information in the Gospels, which are almost completely silent about Jesus' childhood, medieval Christians turned to centuries-old apocryphal texts for answers. In The Quest for the Christ Child in the Later Middle Ages, Mary Dzon demonstrates how these apocryphal legends fostered a vibrant and creative medieval piety. Popular tales about the Christ Child entertained the laity and at the same time were reviled by some members of the intellectual elite of the church. In either case, such legends, so persistent, left their mark on theological, devotional, and literary texts. The Cistercian abbot Aelred of Rievaulx urged his monastic readers to imitate the Christ Child's development through spiritual growth; Francis of Assisi encouraged his followers to emulate the Christ Child's poverty and rusticity; Thomas Aquinas, for his part, believed that apocryphal stories about the Christ Child would encourage youths to be presumptuous, while Birgitta of Sweden provided pious alternatives in her many Marian revelations. Through close readings of such writings, Dzon explores the continued transmission and appeal of apocryphal legends throughout the Middle Ages and demonstrates the significant impact that the Christ Child had in shaping the medieval religious imagination.
Download or read book Translating Christ in the Middle Ages written by Barbara Zimbalist and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2022-02-15 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study reveals how women’s visionary texts played a central role within medieval discourses of authorship, reading, and devotion. From the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, women across northern Europe began committing their visionary conversations with Christ to the written word. Translating Christ in this way required multiple transformations: divine speech into human language, aural event into textual artifact, visionary experience into linguistic record, and individual encounter into communal repetition. This ambitious study shows how women’s visionary texts form an underexamined literary tradition within medieval religious culture. Barbara Zimbalist demonstrates how, within this tradition, female visionaries developed new forms of authorship, reading, and devotion. Through these transformations, the female visionary authorized herself and her text, and performed a rhetorical imitatio Christi that offered models of interpretive practice and spoken devotion to her readers. This literary-historical tradition has not yet been fully recognized on its own terms. By exploring its development in hagiography, visionary texts, and devotional literature, Zimbalist shows how this literary mode came to be not only possible but widespread and influential. She argues that women’s visionary translation reconfigured traditional hierarchies and positions of spiritual power for female authors and readers in ways that reverberated throughout late-medieval literary and religious cultures. In translating their visionary conversations with Christ into vernacular text, medieval women turned themselves into authors and devotional guides, and formed their readers into textual communities shaped by gendered visionary experiences and spoken imitatio Christi. Comparing texts in Latin, Dutch, French, and English, Translating Christ in the Middle Ages explores how women’s visionary translation of Christ’s speech initiated larger transformations of gendered authorship and religious authority within medieval culture. The book will interest scholars in different linguistic and religious traditions in medieval studies, history, religious studies, and women’s and gender studies.
Download or read book English Women s Spiritual Utopias 1400 1700 written by Alexandra Verini and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-06-06 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: English Women’s Spiritual Utopias, 1400-1700: New Kingdoms of Womanhood uncovers a tradition of women’s utopianism that extends back to medieval women’s monasticism, overturning accounts of utopia that trace its origins solely to Thomas More. As enclosed spaces in which women wielded authority that was unavailable to them in the outside world, medieval and early modern convents were self-consciously engaged in reworking pre-existing cultural heritage to project desired proto-feminist futures. The utopianism developed within the English convent percolated outwards to unenclosed women's spiritual communities such as Mary Ward's Institute of the Blessed Virgin and the Ferrar family at Little Gidding. Convent-based utopianism further acted as an unrecognized influence on the first English women’s literary utopias by authors such as Margaret Cavendish and Mary Astell. Collectively, these female communities forged a mode of utopia that drew on the past to imagine new possibilities for themselves as well as for their larger religious and political communities. Tracking utopianism from the convent to the literary page over a period of 300 years, New Kingdoms writes a new history of medieval and early modern women’s intellectual work and expands the concept of utopia itself.
Download or read book Golden Leaves and Burned Books written by Teemu Immonen and published by BoD - Books on Demand. This book was released on 2020-07-30 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In religious reforms, books and other forms of written communication play a dominant role, both for individuals as well as for groups. Covering the period from the late Middle Ages to the early seventeenth century, the chapters of this volume reflect on the use of books in religious reform movements and their impact on lay people and monastic communities. For those committed to religious renewal, books are the necessary and often enthusiastically welcomed vehicles for the transmission of religious reform concepts. They are at the same time often the objects of severe opposition and negative reactions in attempts at hindering or reversing religious reform for others. The researchers make use of approaches from cultural history, book history and English studies, among others. Contributions range from theory and practices of religious reform with special regard to the interaction between the laity and religious orders in their search for models of 'good religious living' to research on the changing processes of communication from manuscript to print and their impact on religious renewal.
Download or read book Moving Women Moving Objects 400 1500 written by Tracy Chapman Hamilton and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-08-12 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection forges new ground in the discussion of aristocratic and royal women, their relationships with their objects, and medieval geography. It explores how women’s geographic and familial networks spread well beyond the borders that defined men’s sense of region and how the movement of their belongings can reveal essential information about how women navigated these often-disparate spaces. Beginning in early medieval Scandinavia, ranging from Byzantium to Rus', and multiple lands in Western Europe up to 1500, the essays span a great spatio-temporal range. Moreover, the types of objects extend from traditionally studied works like manuscripts and sculpture to liturgical and secular ceremonial instruments, icons, and articles of personal adornment, such as textiles and jewelry, even including shoes.
Download or read book Margery Kempe written by Anthony Bale and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2021-09-16 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fresh account of the medieval mystic, traveling pilgrim, and pioneering memoirist Margery Kempe. This is a new account of the medieval mystic and pilgrim Margery Kempe. Kempe, who had fourteen children, traveled all over Europe and recorded a series of unusual events and religious visions in her work The Book of Margery Kempe, which is often called the first autobiography in the English language. Anthony Bale charts Kempe’s life and tells her story through the places, relationships, objects, and experiences that influenced her. Extensive quotations from Kempe’s Book accompany generous illustrations, giving a fascinating insight into the life of a medieval woman. Margery Kempe is situated within the religious controversies of her time, and her religious visions and later years put in context. And lastly, Bale tells the extraordinary story of the rediscovery, in the 1930s, of the unique manuscript of her autobiography.
Download or read book Nothing Pure written by Mo Pareles and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2023-12-18 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Early English culture depended on a Judaism translated away from Jews. Revealing the importance of Jewish law to the workings of early Christian England, Nothing Pure presents a Jewish revision of the history of English Bible translation. The book illuminates the paradoxical process by which the abjection and dehumanization of Jews, a bitter milestone in the history of European racism, was first articulated in the cultural translation of Jewish literature. It locates Old English Bible translation within the history of cultural translation, so that instead of appearing as the romantically liberated fragments of a suppressed mode of literacy, these authorized and semi-authorized vernacular works can be seen as privileged texts appropriating a Jewish source culture into an English Christian host culture. Mo Pareles proposes a theory of translation called supersessionary translation to explain the aesthetics of these texts: while at first glance they appear to dismiss irrelevant Jewish laws according to an arbitrary pattern, closer analysis reveals that they are masterful attempts to subject the legacy of Judaism, through translation, to the control of a system that has purportedly superseded and replaced it. Ultimately, Nothing Pure demonstrates the surprisingly central role of Jewish law in translation to Christian identity in late Old English ecclesiastical and monastic writings.
Download or read book The Avignon Papacy Contested written by Unn Falkeid and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-21 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Avignon papacy (1309–1377) represented the zenith of papal power in Europe. The Roman curia’s move to southern France enlarged its bureaucracy, centralized its authority, and initiated closer contact with secular institutions. The pope’s presence also attracted leading minds to Avignon, transforming a modest city into a cosmopolitan center of learning. But a crisis of legitimacy was brewing among leading thinkers of the day. The Avignon Papacy Contested considers the work of six fourteenth-century writers who waged literary war against the Catholic Church’s increasing claims of supremacy over secular rulers—a conflict that engaged contemporary critics from every corner of Europe. Unn Falkeid uncovers the dispute’s origins in Dante’s Paradiso and Monarchia, where she identifies a sophisticated argument for the separation of church and state. In Petrarch’s writings she traces growing concern about papal authority, precipitated by the curia’s exile from Rome. Marsilius of Padua’s theory of citizen agency indicates a resistance to the pope’s encroaching power, which finds richer expression in William of Ockham’s philosophy of individual liberty. Both men were branded as heretics. The mystical writings of Birgitta of Sweden and Catherine of Siena, in Falkeid’s reading, contain cloaked confrontations over papal ethics and church governance even though these women were later canonized. While each of the six writers responded creatively to the implications of the Avignon papacy, they shared a concern for the breakdown of secular order implied by the expansion of papal power and a willingness to speak their minds.
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 The Revelations of St Birgitta of Sweden written by Birgitta (de Suède, sainte.) and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Revelations of St Birgitta of Sweden Volume I Liber Caelestis Books I III written by Lecturer in Latin and Greek Denis Searby and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2014-05-14 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: St. Birgitta of Sweden (1303-1373, canonized 1391) was one of the most charismatic and influential female visionaries of the later Middle Ages. Altogether, she received some 700 revelations, dealing with subjects ranging from meditations on the human condition, domestic affairs in Sweden, and ecclesiastical matters in Rome, to revelations in praise of the Incarnation and devotion to the Virgin. Her Revelations, collected and ordered by her confessors, circulated widely throughout Europe and long after her death. Many eminent individuals, including Cardinal Juan Torquemada, Jean Gerson, and Martin Luther, read and commented on her writings, which influenced the spiritual lives of countless individuals. Birgitta was also the founder of a new monastic order, which still exists today. She is the patron saint of Sweden, and in 2000 was declared (with Catherine of Siena and Edith Stein) co-patroness of Europe. Birgitta's Revelations present her as a commanding and dauntless visionary who develops a contemplative mysticism that is always interwoven with social engagement and a commitment to the salvation of the world. Their varied style is dominated by frequent juxtapositions of memorable images and allegories that illustrate her fierce and fertile imagination, her sharp powers of observation and understanding, and her passionate and receptive storytelling powers. This is the first of four projected volumes offering the first complete translation of the Revelations into English since the Middle Ages. This volume, which covers Books I-III of the Revelations, contains some of her earliest visions, dating from the 1340s. Book I addresses some of the major themes of her spirituality, and Books II and III contain a sustained critique of the classes of knights and bishops. The editors provide an extensive introduction outlining the major characteristics of Birgitta's spirituality, her life and work, her style and use of sources, and the main features of her theology.
Download or read book The Revelations of St Birgitta of Sweden Volume I Liber Caelestis Books I III written by Bridget Morris and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2006-03-30 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: St. Birgitta of Sweden (1303-1373, canonized 1391) was one of the most charismatic and influential female visionaries of the later Middle Ages. Altogether, she received some 700 revelations, dealing with subjects ranging from meditations on the human condition, domestic affairs in Sweden, and ecclesiastical matters in Rome, to revelations in praise of the Incarnation and devotion to the Virgin. Her Revelations, collected and ordered by her confessors, circulated widely throughout Europe and long after her death. Many eminent individuals, including Cardinal Juan Torquemada, Jean Gerson, and Martin Luther, read and commented on her writings, which influenced the spiritual lives of countless individuals. Birgitta was also the founder of a new monastic order, which still exists today. She is the patron saint of Sweden, and in 2000 was declared (with Catherine of Siena and Edith Stein) co-patroness of Europe.Birgitta's Revelations present her as a commanding and dauntless visionary who develops a contemplative mysticism that is always interwoven with social engagement and a commitment to the salvation of the world. Their varied style is dominated by frequent juxtapositions of memorable images and allegories that illustrate her fierce and fertile imagination, her sharp powers of observation and understanding, and her passionate and receptive storytelling powers.This is the first of four projected volumes offering the first complete translation of the Revelations into English since the Middle Ages. This volume, which covers Books I-III of the Revelations, contains some of her earliest visions, dating from the 1340s. Book I addresses some of the major themes of her spirituality, and Books II and III contain a sustained critique of the classes of knights and bishops. The editors provide an extensive introduction outlining the major characteristics of Birgitta's spirituality, her life and work, her style and use of sources, and the main features of her theology.
