Body and Sacred Place in Medieval Europe, 1100-1389

Body and Sacred Place in Medieval Europe, 1100-1389 PDF Author: Dawn Marie Hayes
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135860033
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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Book Description
Body and Sacred Place in Medieval Europe investigates the medieval understanding of sacred place, arguing for the centrality of bodies and bodily metaphors to the establishment, function, use, and power of medieval churches. Questioning the traditional division of sacred and profane jurisdictions, this book identifies the need to consider non-devotional uses of churches in the Middle Ages. Dawn Marie Hayes examines idealized visions of medieval sacred places in contrast with the mundane and profane uses of these buildings. She argues that by the later Middle Ages-as loyalties were torn by emerging political, economic, and social groups-the Church suffered a loss of security that was reflected in the uses of sacred spaces, which became more restricted as identities shifted and Europeans ordered the ambiguity of the medieval world.

Body and Sacred Place in Medieval Europe, 1100-1389

Body and Sacred Place in Medieval Europe, 1100-1389 PDF Author: Dawn Marie Hayes
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135860033
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 243

Get Book Here

Book Description
Body and Sacred Place in Medieval Europe investigates the medieval understanding of sacred place, arguing for the centrality of bodies and bodily metaphors to the establishment, function, use, and power of medieval churches. Questioning the traditional division of sacred and profane jurisdictions, this book identifies the need to consider non-devotional uses of churches in the Middle Ages. Dawn Marie Hayes examines idealized visions of medieval sacred places in contrast with the mundane and profane uses of these buildings. She argues that by the later Middle Ages-as loyalties were torn by emerging political, economic, and social groups-the Church suffered a loss of security that was reflected in the uses of sacred spaces, which became more restricted as identities shifted and Europeans ordered the ambiguity of the medieval world.

Body and Sacred Place in Medieval Europe, 1100-1389

Body and Sacred Place in Medieval Europe, 1100-1389 PDF Author: Dawn Marie Hayes
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135860041
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
Body and Sacred Place in Medieval Europe investigates the medieval understanding of sacred place, arguing for the centrality of bodies and bodily metaphors to the establishment, function, use, and power of medieval churches. Questioning the traditional division of sacred and profane jurisdictions, this book identifies the need to consider non-devotional uses of churches in the Middle Ages. Dawn Marie Hayes examines idealized visions of medieval sacred places in contrast with the mundane and profane uses of these buildings. She argues that by the later Middle Ages-as loyalties were torn by emerging political, economic, and social groups-the Church suffered a loss of security that was reflected in the uses of sacred spaces, which became more restricted as identities shifted and Europeans ordered the ambiguity of the medieval world.

The church as sacred space in Middle English literature and culture

The church as sacred space in Middle English literature and culture PDF Author: Laura Varnam
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526121824
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
This book presents an exciting new approach to the medieval church by examining the role of literary texts, visual decorations, ritual performance and lived experience in the production of sanctity. The meaning of the church was intensely debated in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. This book explores what was at stake not only for the church’s sanctity but for the identity of the parish community as a result. Focusing on pastoral material used to teach the laity, it shows how the church’s status as a sacred space at the heart of the congregation was dangerously – but profitably – dependent on lay practice. The sacred and profane were inextricably linked and, paradoxically, the church is shown to thrive on the sacrilegious challenge of lay misbehaviour and sin.

Standing on Holy Ground in the Middle Ages

Standing on Holy Ground in the Middle Ages PDF Author: Lucy Donkin
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 150175386X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 501

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Book Description
Standing on Holy Ground in the Middle Ages illuminates how the floor surface shaped the ways in which people in medieval western Europe and beyond experienced sacred spaces. The ground beneath our feet plays a crucial, yet often overlooked, role in our relationship with the environments we inhabit and the spaces with which we interact. By focusing on this surface as a point of encounter, Lucy Donkin positions it within a series of vertically stacked layers—the earth itself, permanent and temporary floor coverings, and the bodies of the living above ground and the dead beneath—providing new perspectives on how sacred space was defined and decorated, including the veneration of holy footprints, consecration ceremonies, and the demarcation of certain places for particular activities. Using a wide array of visual and textual sources, Standing on Holy Ground in the Middle Ages also details ways in which interaction with this surface shaped people's identities, whether as individuals, office holders, or members of religious communities. Gestures such as trampling and prostration, the repeated employment of specific locations, and burial beneath particular people or actions used the surface to express likeness and difference. From pilgrimage sites in the Holy Land to cathedrals, abbeys, and local parish churches across the Latin West, Donkin frames the ground as a shared surface, both a feature of diverse, distant places and subject to a variety of uses over time—while also offering a model for understanding spatial relationships in other periods, regions, and contexts.

Space in the Medieval West

Space in the Medieval West PDF Author: Fanny Madeline
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317052005
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
In the last two decades, research on spatial paradigms and practices has gained momentum across disciplines and vastly different periods, including the field of medieval studies. Responding to this ’spatial turn’ in the humanities, the essays collected here generate new ideas about how medieval space was defined, constructed, and practiced in Europe, particularly in France. Essays are grouped thematically and in three parts, from specific sites, through the broader shaping of territory by means of socially constructed networks, to the larger geographical realm. The resulting collection builds on existing scholarship but brings new insight, situating medieval constructions of space in relation to contemporary conceptions of the subject.

Architecture and Abstraction

Architecture and Abstraction PDF Author: Pier Vittorio Aureli
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262373688
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
A landmark study of abstraction in architectural history, theory, and practice that challenges our assumptions about the meaning of abstract forms. In this theoretical study of abstraction in architecture—the first of its kind—Pier Vittorio Aureli argues for a reconsideration of abstraction, its meanings, and its sources. Although architects have typically interpreted abstraction in formal terms—the purposeful reduction of the complexities of design to its essentials—Aureli shows that abstraction instead arises from the material conditions of building production. In a lively study informed by Walter Benjamin, Karl Marx, Alfred Sohn-Rethel, and other social theorists, this book presents abstraction in architecture not as an aesthetic tendency but as a movement that arises from modern divisions of labor and consequent social asymmetries. These divisions were anticipated by the architecture of antiquity, which established a distinction between manual and intellectual labor, and placed the former in service to the latter. Further abstractions arose as geometry, used for measuring territories, became the intermediary between land and money and eventually produced the logic of the grid. In our own time, architectural abstraction serves the logic of capitalism and embraces the premise that all things can be exchanged—even experience itself is a commodity. To resist this turn, Aureli seeks a critique of architecture that begins not by scaling philosophical heights, but by standing at the ground level of material practice.

Old St Paul’s and Culture

Old St Paul’s and Culture PDF Author: Shanyn Altman
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030772675
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 355

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Book Description
Old St Paul’s and Culture is an interdisciplinary collection of essays that looks predominantly at the culture of Old St Paul’s and its wider precinct in the early modern period, while also providing important insights into the Cathedral’s medieval institution. The chapters examine the symbolic role of the site in England’s Christian history, the London book trade based in and around St Paul’s, the place of St Paul’s commercial indoor playhouse within the performance culture of sixteenth and seventeenth-century London, and the intersection of religion and politics through events such as civic ceremonies and occasional sermons. Through the organising theme of culture, the authors demonstrate how the site, as well as the people and trades occupying the precinct, can be positioned within wider fields of representations, practices, and social networks. A focus on St Paul’s is therefore about more than just the specific site on Ludgate Hill: it is about those practices and representations connected to it, which either extended beyond or originated in places other than the Cathedral environs. This points to the range of localised, regional, national, and transnational relationships in which the precinct and its people were situated and to which they contributed.

Conflicting Femininities in Medieval German Literature

Conflicting Femininities in Medieval German Literature PDF Author: Karina Marie Ash
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317162129
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
Drastic changes in lay religiosity during the High Middle Ages spurred anxiety about women forsaking their secular roles as wives and mothers for religious ones as nuns and beguines. This anxiety and the subsequent need to model an ideal of feminine behavior for the laity is particularly expressed in the German versions of Latin and French narratives. Using thirteenth-century penitentials, monastic exempla, and sermons, Karina Marie Ash clarifies how secular wifehood was recast as a quasi-religious role and, in German epics and romances from the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, how female characters are adapted to promote the salvific nature of worldly love in ways that echo the pastoral reevaluation of women at that time. Then she argues that mid and late thirteenth-century German literature not only reflects this impulse to idealize women's roles in lay society but also to promote an alternative model of femininity that deploys ways of privileging secular roles for women over religious ones. These continuously evolving readaptations of female protagonists across cultures and across centuries reflect fictive solutions for real historical concerns about women that not only complement contemporary pastoral and legal reforms but are also unique to medieval German literature.

Bounded Wilderness

Bounded Wilderness PDF Author: Kathryn Jasper
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501777629
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 185

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Book Description
In Bounded Wilderness, Kathryn Jasper focuses on the innovations undertaken at the hermitage of Fonte Avellana in central Italy during the eleventh century by its prior, Peter Damian (d. 1072). The congregation of Fonte Avellana experimented with reforming practices that led to new ways of managing property and relations among clergy, nobles, and the laity. Jasper charts how Damian's notion of monastic reform took advantage of the surrounding topography and geography to amplify the sensory aspects of ascetic experiences. By focusing on monastic landscapes and land ownership, Jasper demonstrates that reform extended beyond abstract ideas. Rather, reform circulated locally through monastic networks and addressed practical concerns such as property boundaries and rights over water, orchards, pastures, and mills. Putting new sources, both documentary and archaeological, into conversation with monastic charters and Damian's letters, Bounded Wilderness reveals the interrelationship of economic practices, religious traditions, and the natural environment in the idea and implementation of reform.

Gender Differences and the Making of Liturgical History

Gender Differences and the Making of Liturgical History PDF Author: Teresa Berger
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 135193466X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
Mapping uncharted territory in the study of liturgy's past, this book offers a history to contemporary questions around gender and liturgical life. Teresa Berger looks at liturgy's past through the lens of gender history, understood as attending not only to the historically prominent binary of "men" and "women" but to all gender identities, including inter-sexed persons, ascetic virgins, eunuchs, and priestly men. Demonstrating what a gender-attentive inquiry is able to achieve, Berger explores both traditional fundamentals such as liturgical space and eucharistic practice and also new ways of studying the past, for example by asking about the developing link between liturgical presiding and priestly masculinity. Drawing on historical case studies and focusing particularly on the early centuries of Christian worship, this book ultimately aims at the present by lifting a veil on liturgy's past to allow for a richly diverse notion of gender differences as these continue to shape liturgical life.