Conversion and the Contest of Creeds in Early Medieval Christianity

Conversion and the Contest of Creeds in Early Medieval Christianity PDF Author: Marta Szada
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009426443
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 375

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Book Description
This study offers new insights into early medieval Christianity, exploring how religious diversity and politics shaped post-Roman Europe.

Conversion and the Contest of Creeds in Early Medieval Christianity

Conversion and the Contest of Creeds in Early Medieval Christianity PDF Author: Marta Szada
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009426443
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 375

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Book Description
This study offers new insights into early medieval Christianity, exploring how religious diversity and politics shaped post-Roman Europe.

Religious Conversion

Religious Conversion PDF Author: Professor Ira Katznelson
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 1472421515
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
Religious conversion - a shift in membership from one community of faith to another - can take diverse forms in radically different circumstances. As the essays in this volume demonstrate, conversion can be protracted or sudden, voluntary or coerced, small-scale or large. It may be the result of active missionary efforts, instrumental decisions, or intellectual or spiritual attraction to a different doctrine and practices. In order to investigate these multiple meanings, and how they may differ across time and space, this collection ranges far and wide across medieval and early modern Europe and beyond. From early Christian pilgrims to fifteenth-century Ethiopia; from the Islamisation of the eastern Mediterranean to Reformation Germany, the volume highlights salient features and key concepts that define religious conversion, particular the Jewish, Muslim and Christian experiences. By probing similarities and variations, continuities and fissures, the volume also extends the range of conversion to focus on matters less commonly examined, such as competition for the meaning of sacred space, changes to bodies, patterns of gender, and the ways conversion has been understood and narrated by actors and observers. In so doing, it promotes a layered approach that deepens inquiry by identifying and suggesting constellations of elements that both compose particular instances of conversion and help make systematic comparisons possible by indicating how to ask comparable questions of often vastly different situations.

Conversion in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages

Conversion in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages PDF Author: Kenneth Mills
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 9781580461252
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
A re-examination of the social processes behind religious conversions in the Ancient and Early Middle Ages. This volume explores religious conversion in late antique and early medieval Europe at a time when the utility of the concept is vigorously debated. Though conversion was commonly represented by ancient and early medieval writersas singular and personally momentous mental events, contributors to this volume find gradual and incomplete social processes lurking behind their words. A mixture of examples and approaches will both encourage a deepening of specialist knowledge and spark new thinking across a variety of sub-fields. The historical settings treated here stretch from the Roman Hellenism of Justin Martyr in the second century to the ninth-century programs of religious and moral correction by resourceful Carolingian reformers. Baptismal orations, funerary inscriptions, Christian narratives about the conversion of stage-performers, a bronze statue of Constantine, early Byzantine ethnographic writings, and re-located relics are among the book's imaginative points of entry. This focused collection of essays by leading scholars, and the afterword by Neil McLynn, should ignite conversations among students of religious conversion andrelated processes of cultural interaction, diffusion, and change both in the historical sub-fields of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages and well beyond. This book is one of two collections of essays on religious conversion drawn from the activities of the Shelby Cullum Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University between 1999 and 2001. The other volume, Conversion: Old Worlds and New, is also published by the Universityof Rochester Press. Contributors: Susan Elm, Anthony Grafton, Richard Lim, Rebecca Lyman, Michael Maas, Neil McLynn, Kenneth Mills, Eric Rebillard, Julia M. H. Smith, Raymond Van Dam.

The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity

The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity PDF Author: James C. Russell
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199880336
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
While historians of Christianity have generally acknowledged some degree of Germanic influence in the development of early medieval Christianity, Russell goes further, arguing for a fundamental Germanic reinterpretation of Christianity. This first full-scale treatment of the subject follows a truly interdisciplinary approach, applying to the early medieval period a sociohistorical method similar to that which has already proven fruitful in explicating the history of Early Christianity and Late Antiquity. The encounter of the Germanic peoples with Christianity is studied from within the larger context of the encounter of a predominantly "world-accepting" Indo-European folk-religiosity with predominantly "world-rejecting" religious movements. While the first part of the book develops a general model of religious transformation for such encounters, the second part applies this model to the Germano-Christian scenario. Russell shows how a Christian missionary policy of temporary accommodation inadvertently contributed to a reciprocal Germanization of Christianity.

The Introduction of Christianity Into the Early Medieval Insular World

The Introduction of Christianity Into the Early Medieval Insular World PDF Author: Roy Flechner
Publisher:
ISBN: 9782503555041
Category : Electronic books
Languages : en
Pages : 508

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Book Description


Pagan and Christian

Pagan and Christian PDF Author: David Petts
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 178093145X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 144

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Book Description
The conversion to Christianity was a key cultural process that saw the transformation of Europe from classical to medieval world. The growth of the Church has been closely linked with the development of other key institutions, such as the state. It has also been highlighted as a factor in changing attitudes to issues such as the body, time and landscapes. While the study of conversion in the early medieval world has increasingly become a focus for both historians and archaeologists, there has been a lack of engagement with the methodological and theoretical problems underpinning any attempt to explore the archaeology of belief. This book, illustrated with case studies and examples drawn from a range of sources, including the 'Celtic' west, Anglo-Saxon England, Scandinavia and Eastern Europe, tackles some of these important issues. In particular it explores two under-theorised aspects of conversion: the relationship between archaeology and belief, and an attempt to re-centre the 'pagan' as a key element in the conversion process.

Contesting Inter-Religious Conversion in the Medieval World

Contesting Inter-Religious Conversion in the Medieval World PDF Author: Yosi Yisraeli
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317160266
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 451

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Book Description
The Mediterranean and its hinterlands were the scene of intensive and transformative contact between cultures in the Middle Ages. From the seventh to the seventeenth century, the three civilizations into which the region came to be divided geographically – the Islamic Khalifate, the Byzantine Empire, and the Latin West – were busily redefining themselves vis-à-vis one another. Interspersed throughout the region were communities of minorities, such as Christians in Muslim lands, Muslims in Christian lands, heterodoxical sects, pagans, and, of course, Jews. One of the most potent vectors of interaction and influence between these communities in the medieval world was inter-religious conversion: the process whereby groups or individuals formally embraced a new religion. The chapters of this book explore this dynamic: what did it mean to convert to Christianity in seventh-century Ireland? What did it mean to embrace Islam in tenth-century Egypt? Are the two phenomena comparable on a social, cultural, and legal level? The chapters of the book also ask what we are able to learn from our sources, which, at times, provide a very culturally-charged and specific conversion rhetoric. Taken as a whole, the compositions in this volume set out to argue that inter-religious conversion was a process that was recognizable and comparable throughout its geographical and chronological purview.

A History of Christian Conversion

A History of Christian Conversion PDF Author: David W. Kling
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199910928
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 853

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Book Description
Conversion has played a central role in the history of Christianity. In this first in-depth and wide-ranging narrative history, David Kling examines the dynamic of turning to the Christian faith by individuals, families, and people groups. Global in reach, the narrative progresses from early Christian beginnings in the Roman world to Christianity's expansion into Europe, the Americas, China, India, and Africa. Conversion is often associated with a particular strand of modern Christianity (evangelical) and a particular type of experience (sudden, overwhelming). However, when examined over two millennia, it emerges as a phenomenon far more complex than any one-dimensional profile would suggest. No single, unitary paradigm defines conversion and no easily explicable process accounts for why people convert to Christianity. Rather, a multiplicity of factors-historical, personal, social, geographical, theological, psychological, and cultural-shape the converting process. A History of Christian Conversion not only narrates the conversions of select individuals and peoples, it also engages current theories and models to explain conversion, and examines recurring themes in the conversion process: divine presence, gender and the body, agency and motivation, testimony and memory, group- and self-identity, "authentic" and "nominal" conversion, and modes of communication. Accessible to scholars, students, and those with a general interest in conversion, Kling's book is the most satisfying and comprehensive account of conversion in Christian history to date; this major work will become a standard must-read in conversion studies.

Transforming Landscapes of Belief in the Early Medieval Insular World and Beyond

Transforming Landscapes of Belief in the Early Medieval Insular World and Beyond PDF Author: Nancy Edwards
Publisher:
ISBN: 9782503568690
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 526

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Book Description


An Age of Saints?

An Age of Saints? PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004206590
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
This volume focuses on the strategies through which secular and ecclesiastical authorities throughout the early medieval world shaped and exploited Christian culture in their own interests, and the simultaneous attempts of rivals and sceptics to resist that same process.